Word: wildness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...WILD MAN BLUES...
Woody Allen is not someone generally considered predictable, but this scene in Barbara Kopple's rollicking documentary Wild Man Blues reveals a supreme irony. While missing the Academy Awards to go woodwind-shopping might seem eccentric to us, that decision seems supremely predictable to Allen himself. He'll always pick his music over his stardom--it's just that no one in America cares (or even knows) that he plays...
...Wild Man Blues follows Woody Allen and his seven-member jazz band along their 1996 springtime tour of Europe. If that synopsis sounds like material for a three-minute "Entertainment Tonight" profile, then kudos go out immediately to Kopple, who knows that Allen's career as a jazzman is not a fluff-level footnote to his more obvious engagement in the cinema. Her feature-length documentary has already been faulted by some viewers at Sundance for downplaying Woody-as-Filmmaker, a criticism that misses Wild Man Blues's whole point: Woody Allen considers himself a developing musician who's lucky...
...attention," Allen frets, but his travelling companions, apparently used to his anxieties, gently console him. These initial scenes of conversation not only introduce us to the various members of the caravan, including then-fiancee Soon-Yi Previn, they also establish the level of access we get to Woody throughout Wild Man Blues.He talks comfortably, even conversationally before the camera, and he is as happy to discuss perceptions of him as he is presenting his own thoughts...
...started lecturing together. A lot of people said negative things about Eldridge's being a born-again Christian and registered Republican; but I knew him beyond that, they didn't. Even as a Republican, he denounced Gingrich's Contract with America, throwing it across the stage. Sent the crowd wild. Like in the early years, he would do wild things, like challenging Ronald Reagan to a duel in the streets. He knew how to grab the imagination of the people! And that's just one of the many reasons I truly respected...