Word: allens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...guests that have overstayed their welcome. Cities including Minneapolis and Reno, Nev., have implemented annual culling programs as neighbors in smaller towns fight over what to do about early-morning honking and maddening traffic fowl-ups. "The number of geese is growing, and the conflicts are getting worse," says Allen Gosser, a federal wildlife official in Albany...
...Allen unabashedly loved the city in its grimy, dangerous years; his 1979 Manhattan opened with fireworks over Central Park, to the strains of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. That's when the script for Whatever Works first took shape. Today the city is spiffier, and Boris is mired in '70s disgust. But Allen isn't; he's a tour guide to local attractions, from the Statue of Liberty to Madame Tussauds on the Disneyfied 42nd Street. It's a vision of New York City as the welcomer and transformer of all lost souls, possibly including Boris the grouse...
...were wondering, the marriage of Boris and Melody is meant as a demonstration that opposites may attract, but they don't last. Taking a cue from Smiles of a Summer Night, one of Allen's favorite Ingmar Bergman films, Whatever Works liberates its characters from their conventional domestic alliances and finds new lovers: like with like, youth with youth, man with surprisingly congenial woman...
This movie, though, is more than the sum of the films it echoes, including Allen's own. It's common for reviewers of his recent work to cite an early triumph like Bananas or Annie Hall and find the new ones lacking. Whatever Works is different: it has that young-Woody fizz with a mature comic romanticism; it's been aged in wit. If Allen has a decade or two of films left in him and if he makes a really excellent one years from now, people will say, "It's terrific, but it's no Whatever Works...
...generation." In Harold's most famous poem, "I Am in the Hub of the Fiery Force," he flashes back and forth between three or four rhythms like a virtuoso. He was writing about the agonies of being a gay man and an outcast in the U.S. before Allen Ginsberg. The Beats looked up to him. It was a tragedy that Harold never got the recognition that he should have...