Word: allene
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...realizing his deliriously original idea, Allen occasionally stumbles. Some of his transitions are abrupt, some of his jokes predictable. And after nearly three decades, it may be time to revise or retire his screen character. He's too old to keep playing a perpetually muddled romantic victim. But he wears his ambition winningly and, as a filmmaker, achieves a transcendence of his own, making something fresh and beguiling out of that middle-class, middlebrow angst he has so often explored...
Military historians Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen probably wish they had waited a month or so before publishing Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage (Random House; 633 pages; $30). If they had, they could have sneaked in a page or two on the spectacular story of veteran CIA officer Harold Nicholson, who was arrested a few weeks ago for selling secrets to the Russians...
...Woody Allen is notoriously reluctant to reveal much about his movies in advance, but the actors who signed on for Everyone Says I Love You were in for an especially rude shock. A couple of weeks after being cast, they got a call from music arranger Dick Hyman asking if he could send over their songs. Their what? Allen had neglected to tell them that they had enlisted for a musical...
...came up with the idea nearly 20 years ago, while working on Annie Hall. "I wanted to do a musical, but not for real singers and dancers," Allen explains. "I wanted people who could just act, and who would sing with all the emotion of people who are doing the best they can, but it's heartfelt. I went to my parents' 65th anniversary, and they danced. They can't dance. But it had more feeling to it than two people who go to dancing school for 50 years...
...luck of the draw, the cast included two actors, Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda, who had singing experience. Another, Drew Barrymore, pleaded that she was "beneath the human limit" of musical competence, so Allen hired a nonprofessional to dub her voice. But the rest of the cast was both untutored and game, and the result is one of the nerviest experiments yet for a filmmaker who has already tried everything from surrealist fantasy to Ingmar Bergman homage...