1 Broadway Danny Rose
2 Sweet and Lowdown
3 Shadows and Fog
4 Coup de Chance
5 Manhattan Murder Mystery
6 the Curse of the Jade Scorpion
7 Stardust Memories
8 Small Time Crooks
9 Zelig
10 Interiors
11 What's Up, Tiger Lily?
12 Magic in the Moonlight
13 Husbands and Wives
14 Sleeper
15 Blue Jasmine
16 Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex
* But Were Afraid to Ask
17 Match Point
18 Crimes and Misdemeanors
19 Radio Days
20 Bullets Over Broadway
21 Hollywood Ending
22 Café Society
Bunch of Woody Allen movies listed preferentially. Just fell in love with Shadows and Fog and reread Rosenbaum’s short takedown from the Chicago Reader. Love Rosenbaum, but not sure we saw the same film. The remark about dead center compositions struck me as especially odd. So assembled here for the reader’s confusion are twenty-two of the pictures Woody Allen put together between the years 1966 and 2023. He’s made fifty of them in that time, near as I can count and a few of them (like Everyone Says I Love You, for instance) are infuriating in their class bias and shallow story telling. For me, his best are the ones where he’s got a good story to tell. And over the years, which stories are truly his have emerged through repetition. A number of them (Broadway Danny Rose and Sweet and Lowdown especially) are framed by a group of storytellers reminiscing about the central character. As if a series of anecdotes can add up to a life. Of course, it’s the intersection of words, images and performance that truly tell the tale. Pastiche is also central to Allen’s art. He steals from so many masters: Kafka, Fitzgerald, Runyon, Williams, Salinger, in literature and Lang, Pabst, Murnau, Hawks, Welles, Bergman, Fellini, Debord, Antonioni, Donen, Kubrick and Lumet in film. Probably dozens more. These are just the first that come to mind. Reminds me a little of Ulmer in his hyper-productivity and commitment to his method. And his thieving and self-mythologizing. A one-man industry. Worth noting how much Kubrick admired him, for all his faults.
