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Last time we heard from Woody Allen, he complained that he could no longer afford to shoot films in New York, his former exclusive canvas. In an interview with his new hometown newspaper La Republicca, Allen divulged he’ll shoot his next film in Rome: “I love these sophisticated cities,” he enthused. “It’s fantastic to have the possibility to work there, like when I shot Manhattan in New York, Match Point in London and Vicky Cristina Barcelona in Barcelona … Each time, it’s like a declaration of love for certain places. I project onto the big screen my feelings for places which count a lot in my life. I hope to do the same thing with Rome.”
While some Gotham-ites might react bitterly to seeing Allen so far from home, I think his films got dramatically better when he left New York and that his writing and shooting have been revived considerably by the change in locale.
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Woody, we miss you in NYC! Please come home.
I have refused to see a single movie of Allen’s since the Soon Yi debacle. Don’t miss him a bit!
No one cares for your self-righteous protests and boycotts. Keep them to yourself.
Victoria, I hear ya. Although I cringe when I think of the likes of Allen or Polanski, I’ll wait for their movies to go on Netflix so that I’m still in the know (as a film lover) without feeling like I directly contributed to the box office numbers of two ethically-questionable dudes.
Au contraire. He hasn’t made a good movie in ages and he makes every European city that he shoots look faker than a postcard in a tourist trap. None of his European films are better than Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Hannah and Her Sisters or Manhattan.
Woody Allen just shoots his usual scripts in an exotic setting and a few people still buy it.
“Match Point” received its harshest critics from British papers: the depiction of the society in it is just ridiculous (in addition to, as one friend pointed it to me, that the Scarlett Johansson character wouldn’t spend a day alone when there are so many London stock brokers eager to seduce a good looking girl).
Rebecca Hall spent years on Catalan studies in “Vicky Christina Barcelona”, including learning Spanish. Bad choice, because people in Barcelona don’t speak Castillan Spanish. They speak Catalan. Everybody who’s spent a few hours in Barcelona knows this.
His recent films are full of these cultural mistakes. Most US critics won’t notice them because they know zilch about European culture and they’re convinced that Allen nailed it. As a European, I strongly disagree. Woody Allen’s movies have always been mostly fantasies (his depiction of Manhattan is even more of a recreated inner universe than Spike Lee’s, for instance, is). His switch to Europe just makes up for the fact that his recent films have been unimaginative and uninspired, with little input from the local culture, outside of some postcard vignettes.
Mike,
You’re right on the money re Woody’s films improving in recent outings. Important though, to note the films shot in London/Barcelona are an improvement over his last few films shot in NYC. I don’t expect him to repeat the golden era of Annie, Hannah, Manhattan, C&M, etc., but I’m in the camp that appreciates the rejuvenation (I see) in his latest work. Perhaps having to bring in Euro partners and getting forced out of his comfort zone did some good.
The faux postcard perfect Manhattan and its re-imagined inhabitants via Woody’s fantasy are exactly why I love his movies. If I wanted real, I’d watch a documentary.
Couldn’t agree more — if I wanted real, I’d seek out Frederick Wiseman or something –
Match Point and Vicky Cristina were WAYYYY out of the Allen comfort zone (inappropriately older Jew, hot young shiksa, stylized NYC devoid of minorities). Particularly Match Point, which played more like Hitchcock than vintage Allen. Only people still carrying a grudge over the Soon-Yi thing (how long ago was that anyway, 15 years? She’s legal now, people) would say that his newer films aren’t at least entertaining.
He’s been in uncharted waters for some time now. It’s tough to come to terms with the fact we will never again see him in one of his own films opposite Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow. I own 26 of his best films on DVD and my wife and I have been watching nothing but these films, or so it seems, for the past 6 months. We must have seem some of them 20-30 times. Our first addiction was A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, followed by Crimes & Misdemeanors and Husbands & Wives, and now our time is split between Manhattan and Manhattan Murder Mystery. I was relieved by how much I enjoyed You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger because Whatever Works was awful (what a disappointing partnership between Allen and David) and while Vicky Cristina Barcelona is an objectively excellent film, it’s not what I look for from Woody Allen. Scoop was delightful and mildly amusing in places but not something I turn over in my head while giggling in the shower or at my desk at work. I hope he can finish this decade and give us at least 2 more outings filled with psychoanalytic constructs and existentialist humor.
Wow, Tony Roberts has sure got some serious silver wavy mullet action going on there.
His tank is empty, but, man, when it was full he had a run like no other. the number of classics he created might never be matched. so many. it’s a shame to see the crap he’s cranked out over the last ten years. it’s all unwatchable. i even find it hard at times to watch some of his old stuff like manhattan because he basically became one of his own characters but worse–married his adopted daughter and had a child with her! there’s the manhattan reboot studios! I guess after that what can you possible write that’s more dramatic and tragic. I don’t know… i understand there are all kinds of love in this lifetime… but… yikes…
His run wasn’t close to as good as Godard in the 60s or Fassbinder in the 70s. Not close. He was a a very good writer at his best, but never a great movie director. Almost every film he’s made for the last twenty years has been artistically worthless.
Oh my.
Are you really complaining that his recent efforts are not up to par with Annie Hall?
‘You made one of the all-time great comedy movies and you can’t follow that up with something BETTER?’
Perspective, please.
Sounds like you’re speaking for all of Europe, which I doubt. Perhaps you do, but hardly anybody cares about getting all the cultural details of any city or culture correct in filmmaking. Generally, audiences don’t look for that. What filmmakers seek to create, and what audiences seek to experience, is a sense of romance. Most of the time that means making stuff up in order to create an idealized version of something. It could be details, it could be an experience, it could be anything.
Your argument reminds of one I had with a colleague, long ago. He went on and on about how independent films are real, about how films out of Hollywood were fake. What he didn’t seem to understand was that all fictional movies are works of fiction. That means certain things will not be depicted as they occur in real life. That some films contain a higher degree of realism than others, yet all are by nature contrivances.
If you think Woody Allen’s idealized versions of New York City are true to life, I have a plot of land in Florida I’d like to sell you.
All is well and good in the 70′s, 80′s and part of the 90′s…, but since MP & VCB, Woodys scripts have been crap. Great actors, no story. Come on Woody, if you are going to ask your Intl partners to make your dreams happen, start caring. We are losing money. CARE.
I would guess that Berlin will be the next stop after Rome. He is the modern-day equivalent of the Wandering Jew, in exile from a homeland that does not appreciate him.
Woody was indeed one of the great American filmmakers. Most likely the greatest writer/director of all time. No, his later work does not have the genius of his earlier work, but I still enjoyed Matchpoint and VCB perhaps more for the themes they address than the actual execution. I hope he chooses to and can afford to finish out his magnificent career in Manhattan where his true home is. Regardless, he has probably put together a body of work that will never be equalled by another director who writes his own material. Who is even close?
@ OxfordPenguin
I’ve never pretended that Allen made realistic movies. English is not my first language, so I prefer to write it otherwise: his Manhattan is a place that’s mostly a projection of his own imagination and I’m fine with it. I wouldn’t visit New York and expect a place looking like a Woody Allen movie. Up until “Deconstructing Harry”, Allen mostly made fine movies and a few clunkers (“Stardust Memories” is an embarrassing rip-off of Fellini’s “8 1/2″) and he can be proud.
For more than a decade, his work ethic of making a movie every year (he explains that by always preparing a movie his natural laziness can’t take over) has been working against him because his creativity isn’t as strong as before.
“Match Point” was praised as a return to form. However, it was a New York script that he clumsily adapted to London when he got British backers. It’s more exotic than usual but outside of the British cast, the script is still a little lazy, taking the basic idea of his own “Crimes & Misdemeanors”, reversing some of the plot of An American Tragedy/A Place In The Sun and then using some faux-Hitchcock pace.
I wouldn’t mind the factual error in “Vicky Christina Barcelona” about Catalan/Castillan but it’s revelatory of a movie that looks more like a one-day-visit of Barcelona and Catalonia than something inbred there. Flamenco dancers? You got them. Gaudi houses? Of course. The worst crime in the movie is however be the narration that spoonfeeds the audience and explicits every innuendo in the script. Check the gratuitous rant against digital photography, for instance…
I still find these movies pleasant but hardly essential Allen stuff. It’s an improvement over rock-bottom stuff such as “Anything Else” (aka boring guy breaks up with a grating girl) or Whatever Works (a rehashed project from the ’70s that had been written with Zero Mostel in mind) but given what I’ve seen from Allen’s English or Spanish movies, I’m not very anxious about his Parisian movie or his Rome project.