Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Instead, Allen put it all on the line with Interiors. In making his first serious movie, what he calls "a drama in the traditional sense," Allen gambled his presumed hammerlock on American humor for a shot at fame as a "serious artist." If Interiors flops, all Allen will have left is the old image of an undignified loser--only it won't seem quite so funny any more...
...most depressing spectacles on television is Erma Bombeck's regular weekday stint on ABC's Good Morning America. From her humble beginnings as a syndicated newspaper humor columnist, Bombeck has evolved into a TV personality of the most plastic sort. She delivers her one-liners in a strident vibrato; she luxuriates in canned laughter as though it were the praise of a Nobel Prize jury. Bombeck used to satirize the vulgarity of American suburbia; now she epitomizes...
About the best thing to be said for the film is that Bombeck does not play the autobiographical heroine herself. That odious chore has fallen instead to Carol Burnett, an actress who is often capable of extracting humor from even the most puerile material. This is one of her rare failures. Bombeck's stale jokes about crabgrass and Tupperware parties defy levitation; the cutesie plot is predictable to anyone who has ever encountered any incarnation of Please Don 't Eat the Daisies. Unfortunately, Burnett doesn't get any help from Director Robert Day. His idea of high...
...parents or his childhood in any but the most joking tones, the most passing references. One would suppose the serious documentary-maker would take Woody's desire to avoid that period of life as a full-speed ahead signal to explore another potentially crucial source of Allen's humor and another central clue to what makes up Allen the man. One can only conclude that Mantell is not a serious documentary maker...
MANTELL'S FLIMSY effort to capture the essence of what makes Woody Allen an American comedy only lightly brushes over the subject, concentrating not on the sources of Allen's humor but on his technique of turning that humor into finished comedy. Nor does the film ask why audiences identify so strongly with Allen--do they laugh out of recognition or from the sheer absurdity? If only Mantell had titled his work something less pompous it would be fine; as Woody Allen: Some Random Facts, no viewer would be misled into thinking he would get an explanation of Allen instead...