Word: allene
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...Europe (where his fondest admirers live, and where the money for his pictures now comes from), he'd made a suave sex-and-murder mystery, Match Point, and two that deserve to have the veil of anonymity drawn over them, so I won't mention their titles. That Allen keeps making films is seen by many as an act of will, almost defiance, by a man whose genius evaporated some time in the late...
...coming, though I hope not soon: Woody Allen will die, and commentators will declare him one of the great American comic filmmakers - maybe not even comic; just great, period. The judicious long view, and postmortem sentiment, will allow critics to ignore or rationalize the dip in the quality of Allen's films from the mid-'90s, or whenever they once declared the fall-off began. Instead they will concentrate on the official classics, especially Annie Hall and Manhattan, and on Allen's amazingly predictable productivity: since the mid-70s he has averaged a film a year as writer-director...
...Cristina Barcelona, and it's just fine. Not great; just fine - a breezy roundelay about pretty people finding lust with improper strangers. It is also the kind of movie that isn't made much anymore, which makes the movie seem rare, perhaps precious. So a pre-mortem revaluation of Allen has begun. In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote of "his recent creative resurrection," which would mean she values (and now I have to mention them) Scoop and Cassandra's Dream more highly than reason allows. I like the new movie, within reason; the question that nags...
...this is going to turn into a panel discussion.") But a bout of stomach poisoning breaks Cristina's mood, and she must convalesce the rest of the weekend. That leaves Juan Antonio with the disapproving, and spoken-for, Vicky. She is one of those females, rife in the Allen canon, whose insecurity is expressed as hostility to men; she castrates, or at least circumcises, them with every cutting word. And Hall, with her flawless American accent, is equally persuasive at inhabiting, not just miming, the stammering tenseness of the traditional Allen heroine...
...less than Henry James, Allen is judgmental of Americans abroad - they betray a sexual naïveté when exposed to a society so much more practiced in the art of gracious loving. And no less than Vicky and Cristina, Allen is almost starstruck by the Spaniards, and the Mediterranean ease in forming, then releasing, sexual liaisons. The hallmark of his characters is the fumbling confession of furtive love; but in this idealized Catalonia, where nothing romantic is forbidden, everything is beautiful, as natural as breathing in synch with the woman who has fallen asleep in your arms...