Word: fellini
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...film. "What's that music?" one will ask referring to the soundtrack after a particularly absorbing drama. Finally the improbable conclusion, and one of the film's few hackneyed moments: an elegant string ensemble in an alley-the soundtrack's players taking a bow? -stirs memories of similar Fellini incongruities, satirized here by the moment's harshness...
...recreated a hilariously familiar world for those who call that stubborn borough's East Side "home." But with Stardust Memories, he has made a film for that lone neurotic New Yorker who calls Woody Allen's apartment "home." It is cold, uninviting and spiteful, a brooding flipside to Fellini's 8 1/2, a masturbating-cousin to Fosse's All That Jazz. It is autobiographical, as all his films have been autobiographical, but Stardust Memories is repulsively self-conscious, full of loathing and self-loathing. Worst of all, it's not even funny...
Stardust Memories is Woody Allen's 8½.Taking his cue from Federico Fellini's great comic fantasy, Allen has set his film in a resort hotel and cast himself as a film maker, very much like the Woody Allen we think we know, who finds himself in a creative culdesac. The film mixes memory and fantasy with the surreal-life present. Its visual style is a gloss on 8½'s: seductive black-and-white images, express-train pacing, a foregrounding of comic bit players. The three main women in 8½ (a mistress, a wife...
...that is a dead end for this prolific, personal film maker. Stardust Memories has much to please the eye and ear. Cinematographer Gordon Willis and Production Designer Mel Bourne have created an austere, bleached environment that gives Allen's film a look as distinctive as a Bergman or Fellini film-or, rather, a Bergman and a Fellini film. And there are enough quotable gags to fill a movie review, if not a weekend seminar at a resort hotel. But there is also a sense of aridity, of desperation...
Because Woody Allen, like Fellini, has an acute sense of the absurd, he can see as much humor in his own splintered isolation as he can in the clumsy attempts of outsiders to break into the cage, to crash the cocktail party inside his head. Stardust Memories is a schizoid invitation to that party. The card says: COME ONE, COME ALL. BRING YOUR OWN BOOS. And in a fine hand at the bottom you can read: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT...