Word: buts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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The distance between the director and the screen persona is exactly the same as the distance it flatteringly allows the viewer to place between his real and everyday persons. It licenses us to believe that our everyday behavior doesn't truly reflect our character, which is altogether deeper, more astute...
The films are all but indistinguishable-we come away with a memory of one or two good jokes, but people don't remember Woody Allen jokes. Because Monty Python, like anything surrealistic, depends on the realism it parodies; it takes not of the world outside and (ab)uses it. Whereas...
At once massively narcissistic and entirely cowardly, Allen is everywhere, but almost never filmed alone in close-up. He's never shown in solitude (though often oh so wrenchingly alone.) It's his privilege to make fun of himself (so that by a sleight-of-hand he accepts the contempt...
So Diane Keaton has to get stoned before sex in Annie Hall; this is just a joke (like her family). With Woody Allen, the same situation would be defused (but taken seriously) by a reference to his maternal ogre, a castrating Semite battleaxe. And he's notably coy about showing...
AND NOT JUST IN the movie theatres. He's reached the course directories, too, and now the bookshops display a new-spawned product of academia, Loser Takes All by Maurice Yacowar of Brock University, Ontario. For Yacowar, Allen is 'a serious, probing artist with a consistent and distinctive vision.' His...