Word: stardusts
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...blown out to sea, David Bowie has tried on almost as many private roles and public personas as he has written songs. In the '60s there was the strutting London mod. Then the sensitive singer-songwriter. Then in 1972 Bowie became the hero of his own concept album, Ziggy Stardust, playing the part in concert and, increasingly, letting it play out in life...
Zelig is the culmination of a long quest by Allen. He is virtually the only celebrity who has continually investigated the values and liabilities of his own status. Three years ago, in Stardust Memories, he attempted to order these thoughts on film and was roundly criticized for so doing. In that story of a comedian oppressed by his own fame, he was unable to achieve the distance and objectivity he needed. Zelig's form provides both. Acutely satirizing mediaspeak, the film hilariously exposes the vulgarizations and misleading distortions of that language. At the same time, it touchingly demonstrates that...
...came of age in 1938, then Artie Shaw's version of Begin the Beguine might be the signature he went by, the sound that would date his soul like the exact ring on a redwood. A few years earlier, it might have been Hoagy Carmichael doing Stardust...
...want a methodical compilation of transcribed Allen jokes may as well turn to Getting Even or Without Feathers; that way, at least, they'll be spared the anxious author's attempts to supply context, justification and an inexorable order of development. Running as far toward the present as Stardust Memories, the book obviously cannot address Allen's latest, but the flaw is less than it might be, for no great effort of imagination is needed to deduce what Jacobs would say about it: It's funny, it draws on the difference between reality and dreams...
Onward and upward with the arts. First he outsolemnized Ingmar Bergman with Interiors. Then, with Stardust Memories, he scored a modest 5 out of Fellini's 8½. Now Woody Allen has transported Shakespeare's "wood near Athens" to upstate New York at the turn of this century for A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. As might be expected, none of these homage-pastiches measures up to the original. But then, neither Bergman nor Fellini nor even Shakespeare ever tried writing a Woody Allen comedy...