Woody Allen

To me, the problem with Woody Allen is that he's gone high concept. All his movies seem to be this way. Stuff with ghosts, time travel, invisibility and all this nonsense. In a PBS documentary about him, we see him going through all his ideas for movies he has lying around and it's all crap like that.

There was a review in the Atlantic Monthly of his latest movie, filmed in Rome. The critic felt that Allen's pace, making a film a year, was too much for anyone. He hasn't taken the time to develop them. It quotes Allen as saying he doesn't think he'll make another great film and if he does, it will be by accident.

Well, the guy is 76. He appears quite healthy and his father died at age 100. My guess is that he's got a good ten years of work left, but if he takes three years to develop a movie, there's a good chance that it won't be made. I know there are some---John Huston and Sydney Lumet are two----who've worked into their 80s, but it doesn't happen often.

In any case, Allen is doing what he wants. It's silly to offer him advice at this point.

I think I stated my opinion here before. Allen started out making movies that simply a long series of gags. He didn't direct Play It Again, Sam because he didn't know if he could make something with a beginning, a middle and an end, even though he wrote it.

But the earlier movies had greater cinematic merit than his later movies. They were movies that couldn't exist as anything but movies. There was no way to do a novelization.

I'm sure he imagines he's reaching greater artistic heights now, but in his more "serious" movies, everything is verbalized; watching the movie and reading the script are pretty much the same experience.