Word: funnier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gifts. Steamrollered by his staff -- incompetents to the last man, woman and child -- into attending a weekend retrospective of his work (a vicious parody of Judith Crist's Connecticut film weekends), he finds himself incessantly put upon by fans ("I just adore your movies, especially the earlier funnier ones"), groupies, unemployed actors, and other assorted morons who interrupt even his phone calls with requests for photos, autographs, jobs, charity appearances, sex, or a hearing for some stupendously bad idea for a new movie. In addition, he's trying to get his current lady (Barrault) to leave her husband...
...this sounds like the hyperbole of extreme disappointment, of bitter frustration at the fall of a modern comic idol, it is. Stardust Memories may be funnier than one cares to admit but Allen's eighth film is certainly no comedy. It's not a tragedy either, or even a strangled drama like Interiors. It smells most like a farce, a self-pitying self-satire. It is so contemptuously intellectual that the jokes about intellectuals are not funny but ironic. "Intellectuals are like the Mafia: they only kill their own," Allen snaps, acknowledging his brand of artistic suicide. Allen was once...
...seem to find what he's looking for. "Doesn't he know he has the greatest gift anyone could have, the gift of laughter?" says a critic. "I don't feel funny," responds Woody. "I look around the world and all I see is human suffering." "Tell funnier jokes," demand the critics, "too much reality is not what the people want." "Yeah, but I've got to find meaning," insists Woody, as if his jokes have no "meaning." It's a shame, but the fantasy-worlds of his "early comedies" held more meaning than all the self-important intellectualizing...
...kind of romantic comedies that established his cult, which for him means a return to the played-out past. He rejects this advice, but he can't escape it. He even dreams of encountering an extraterrestrial who tells him: "You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes...
...grand, silly movie original 42nd Street that Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley whipped up for Warner Bros. in 1933 was shorter, sharper and funnier than this elaboration, which includes several more numbers and, if possible, even less plot. The Warren-Dubin songs like Go into Your Dance, Shuffle off to Buffalo and About a Quarter to Nine are jazzy bits of innocent syncopation. There is now a good deal of narrative and emotional weight on these tunes, which are graceful little paper boats never made for such heavy cargo. The book, which the program accurately calls "lead-ins and crossovers...