haven't seen it. not available in the streaming world, unfortunately, or i'd check it out tonight.
i'm a bit on the fence with most of the early comedies. the only one i remember really enjoying was sleeper.
i think his prime was ... let's say 85 to 89. crimes.... & purple rose are his greatest achievements, and everything else he did in that era was at minimum really good.
Quite consistent across all males is the fact that they're very reluctant to accept that those who look similar to them may be sexual predators or abusers. Considering most victims are likely of the same race, it's up to individual communities to report or hold these people accountable. A lot of men and some women would simply prefer to protect the peace. In my years at a PWI I remember the community taking action against one Indian and one Black rapist. Of course, there were many whites with some poor reputations, but I don't remember the community coming together like they did in those cases. I consider myself consistent when it comes to these kind of accusations and promptly stopped associating with the accuse, but what do I know.
At the moment, the presumption is Woody has no bio children. So, taking in history it's probable that Ronan's Sinatra's. Besides, one can kind of understand Mia if she adopts that many with his consent, and he then walks out. Things can get ugly downstream...
His 80s movies are all great. His 70s movies are scattershot, Annie Hall and Sleeper are great and the reluctant sperm sequence from Everything You wanted to Know About Sex is one of the most hilarious bits ever filmed. Since then his movies are more hit or miss.
I first watched Woody Allen's 70's movies as a horny, hormone-raging teenager in the late 70s, so those early comedies (Sleeper, Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted To Know...) were the ones that imprinted on me. Tried to watch Annie Hall but thought it was boring, but that was young me. I need to check out his 80s output and reassess; thanks for the insight.
The "You haven't seen _____!" is actually a pretty fun game to play with family and friends. Everyone has movies that people of their age/sex/status should have seen but haven't. For example, one of my adult male friends had never seen any Indiana Jones movie, and he refused for decades to see it after we (his friends) discovered this fact because he loved the frustration and reaction it caused.
In 1989, when I was first dating my future wife, we saw a lot of movies. Since we married in 1991, we've seen very few movies. The only time I ever took my wife out to the movies was to watch "Master and Commander." I had to. I've read all the novels.
I hadn't seen "Home Alone" until maybe 2018. My dad never saw Star Wars, which mystified me as a kid. Why would you not want to see the most amazing movie of all time? Of course now I get it. Why would an adult, used to 1970s cinema, be excited for that? Of course he did see "Return of the Jedi" because some business connection got us tix to the Chicago premier.
If our artists are going to be moralists, prudes, censors, scolds, witch hunters and brittle conformists, what do we even have them for?
Give me Polanski, Celine, Pound, Picasso, Roth etc etc and all the other famous freaks, maniacs, bigots and rampaging phalli of the past any day—they may have broken laws and mores and bones but they built new worlds and lasting works of consequence.
Frank Sinatra's illegitimate son is almost as lame, fake and gay as Fidel Castro's illegitimate Canadian son—the conquering hero has given way to the sensitive scold. From rooster to capon in one generation.
I didn't even think of Byron—Lady Caroline Lamb never forgave him after she sent him a packet of her pubes and he refused to reciprocate. She made him even more famous.
I don't know Elvis deeply but I get the impression he got a lot of tail by being good looking famous and kind of well meaning aw shucks country sincere. Byron was something darker and drove the ladies mad. He also supposedly brought a bear into his college dorm room because they had a rule against dogs.
I think the arc of Elvis' life demonstrates that he was a young, talented, yet naive man, who, after having spent his adult life being manipulated in the entertainment industry, became cynical and jaded in his later years.
I compare Byron to Elvis because he was (maybe) the first international celebrity and because there were entire industries (in his case books, journals and newspapers) that tracked his every movement, spread all sorts of gossip about him and obsessively chronicled his every romantic adventure (whether true or false). (Byron, also like Elvis, never had a single friend who didn't try to cash in w some kind of memoir about him.)
Also Byron and Elvis were both strikingly beautiful men who drove the ladies crazy, but who spent the latter years of their short lives trying to live down/transcend their reputations as wild Adonises, but whose image overpowered (and outlived) any of their best work.
It's a fun parallel, but obviously only goes so far.
I agree! It means your daughter, sister and mother will wear yoga pants in public outlining their private parts. Do away with religious prudery and bring on the sluttery of Clever Pseudonym's female relatives! Hell yeah!
the topic is art, film and literature not ugly clothing. in fact, more restrictive norms and mores have always produced the more adventurous forms of expression. the age of mass man and mass media has produced mass gluttony and slobbery but it was the age of the aristocrats that built lasting art and culture. we should all be prudes in public and wild sluts on the page...
I mean, that's what happens when you have queer women in charge of the culture. Even heterosexual women like bad boys, but while lesbians can't exterminate men, if they emasculate them they have a better chance at the bisexuals.
I'm sympathetic to Woody Allen, but I don't like Annie Hall because Diane Keaton reminds me too much of my sister and daughter and I would seriously want to kick Woody's ass if he was dating either one.
The problem I have with Hannah and Her Sisters is that when the movie I was dating a beautiful women who could have been a doppelganger for Barbara Hershey. She dumped me a week before I saw the movie which left me really depressed.
Allen's greatest talent is putting the Boomer Jewish Id on screen for all the world to see and becoming famous for it. Sex-obsessed, morally bankrupt, and shallow pretending to be deep.
When you work with their raw data, CDC is awesome. I watched ILI-net through 2020. As 'cases' surged, the number of people presenting with symptoms at clinics and emergency rooms fell below epidemic baseline in mid-May, and stayed there.
It's interesting that his name still pops up "in the culture," in a current-day (or quasi-current-day) sense.
IMDB lists twelve directorial credits for Woody Allen, released since he turned 75 in 2010 (and thirteen writing credits, usually in the same films).
The Ngram AmEng corpus suggests people put Woody Allen's name in published material a steady rate between the late 1980s and late 2010s. (After a steady rise between 1965 and ca.1985.) Starting ca.1986 and over the following ca. 35, there was no real downtrend in "Woody Allen mentions." Even by the time he turned eighty (Nov. 2015), still no downtrend. Maybe there will be one evident in the early-2020s (but Ngram is always unreliable on the most-recent years).
Woody Allen's ancestors were Eastern European Jews who arrived in the 1890s and took part in the by-then-ongoing process of taking control of New York City (signs of Woody Allen's ancestors' education and abilities were that at least some of them could speak full-on proper German in addition to Yiddish).
Here in the 2020s, 130 years later, the influence of the mid-1880s to mid-1910s movement, of Jews from Eastern Europe to the USA (and subsequent top-ups over the rest of the 20th century) remains so decisive-seeming to the course of U.S. culture and power-dynamics. Yet also a kind of taboo within the USA.
Allen, like Clint Eastwood, has never stopped working, so every new crop of film executives and producers, no matter how dumb or inexperienced, has recent knowledge of their films. And Allen, for all his evil flaws, has good talent and knows if he just keeps churning things out, he will be able to pump out a good one every now and then.
Allen did have a good quote once: "Half of life is just showing up." In showbizness especially, lots of people are flaky and the deals fall through or contracts aren't fulfill,ed and many things are thus delayed/late/not on time/skipped, causing expense or replacement, so someone like Allen who gets a reputation of reliability, durability, and things coming in under-budget is valuable. Allen's movies will not lose you money, will get done on time, and will get decent critical acclaim. Before his moral depravity became a liability he was a safe bet.
P.S. It also hasn't hurt that Allen's movies are about sex-obsessed upper-middle class American Boomer Jews having sexcapade adventures in NYC (or other places where Boomer Jews like to visit). Since lots of his contemporary critics, financiers, and producers fit that bill and lots of American Boomer Jews will line up to see movies about themselves, Allen has a niche that guarantees him good reviews and profitable box office returns on any movie that isn't horrendous.
My impression is that quite a few of Woody's later movies around the turn of the century lost his backers money, but a highly limited amount (e.g., $2 million) which they could afford in return for being able to tell their friends they were investors in a Woody Allen movie.
It would have been nice if Whit Stillman had had that kind of support. But a lot of artists aren't as stable as Allen at showing up every damn day.
Allen's background as a playwright and the fact that he famously never moved to LA or got trapped in the studio system also helped. Since Allen's movies are talk-fests with verbal wordplay, don't rely on special effects, and aren't expected to be the #1 movie of the year, and he doesn't have studio-dinks leaning over his shoulder forcing reshoots, the budget stays down. Allen is at home with bare stages and uses the scenery of NYC only as enhancement.
Allen mostly films on location in NYC rather than using studio-built sets, which at first would seem more expensive. However, Allen is quite knowledgeable about NYC, as he lives there and hangs out there and thus he's already scouted his locations in his mind long before a film is made. Ergo he can keep the budget down because he knows exactly what shots he wants. Also, he doesn't go for fantastic camera work or shots but uses traditional ones, so the expense is down there as well.
Allen movies (the ones I’ve seen) are like Updike novels (the ones I’ve read.) Warnings not to waste any more of the precious minutes of your life on them.
> famous middle-aged men should stay away from high school girls they aren’t going to marry.
They probably should stay away from them even if they would gladly marry them; there is a reason why American Beauty* is now seen as distasteful even though it was lauded when it was released.
> Rebecca Hall: I don’t think that we should be the ones who are doing judge and jury on this.
I am still of the opinion that the Democratic Party owes Al Franken an apology, as he might have been president in 2+ months if he wasn't MeTooëd. Of course Minnesota was going to elect another Democrat to replace him so no one was going to fight too hard for him in 2018. While Norm Coleman won in this century he was running against a dead man; it's hard to believe that in the entirety of the 80s Minnesota had TWO Republican US Senators in David Durenberger and Rudy Boschwitz
*If you haven't seen it, it is still worth watching, even though Kevin Spacey overacts a bit
Yes, it's amazing how he didn't push back at all. Like a good Democrat he just took one for the team so they could win that special election in 2017 for the senate seat in Alabama (Doug Jones [D] vs Roy Moore [R]). Even though Jones won that race, he ended up losing to Tommy Tuberville in 2020 anyway, negating the point of his immolation.
As an aside, I think covid warped my sense of time, as that special election seems a lot longer than 7 years ago.
Franken exemplifies one of my heuristics-- an idealist or a man who wants to hold on to his principles, can't last in politics. If you want to argue your guy is one of the good guys, acting on principle, he'd better be a first term congressman. People who make a lifelong career of it have to be scumbags. The system will dump you on your ass if you try to stay good
Guy claims to be a feminist and he's goofing on sleeping women by appearing to sexually grope them for a secret photo to embarrass them?
Franken's hypocrisy abounds here. This wasn't Opie & Anthony, who openly disdained feminism and made dirty jokes about women as a challenge to the culture; this was some guy who claims to be some kind of "deep thinker" on politics, claims the left-wing mantle, and promotes feminazism. You can't be a male feminist and then try to have it both ways by doing locker room-type pranks on women. (Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules...)
Its why people accepted Trump's "grab 'em by the p******" excuse as locker room talk, because Trump has never embraced feminism on his platform or in his public persona. There's videos of him flirting and treating women as women and not feminist equals.
Franken got hoisted on his own hypocritical petard.
P.S. One hilarious moment before Frankengroper ran away and resigned was when a group of female former SNL hacks wrote a letter claiming Frankengroper had never acted inappropriately with them so therefore this was all overblown/fake. Well, yeah, because you SNL hacks were far less attractive than the chick Frankengroper made it look like he groped.
"That's not funny!" has been a trope about feminists for forever. The humorless, dour, fun-time-ruining suffragette has been a staple of history.
Also, Feminism=communism, and was always this evil. So Frankengroper can get wrecked with his "it wasn't like this before" argument. He promoted this b.s. and he rightfully got stabbed by the scorpion he was escorting across the river.
I think #MeToo was when I pretty much gave up on love and started completely distrusting the opposite sex. (I think this may actually be a gift to the women of the world, or as Stephen King said in a very different context, 'No great loss'.)
But yeah, Franken was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's probably better for the country he wouldn't have been president--he was quite left-wing and smart and competent. I don't think he had the charisma for it to really become President though. Short dorky Jewish guy for President? Nah. They're happy to let guys like that write the manuals but they don't let them fly the plane.
"Allen’s presumed son Ronan Farrow...[has] gotten himself a lot of plastic surgery so that he looks more like his conception of who his real father must be (in his mind), Mia’s first husband Frank Sinatra, rather than Woody."
After all this time he hasn't been talked into doing a DNA-paternity test?
His pre-plastic-surgery pictures all suggest Allen (or someone with similar phenotype).
(1.) "War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence," W. W. Norton & Co., 2018.
(2.) "Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators," Little, Brown & Co., 2019.
The second book followed his 2017-18 writing about Harvey Weinstein and other cases of alleged sex abuse and exploitation (his early targets were more often Jews than not, but not always).
In the flurry of excitement after the "#MeToo" movement began in late 2017 a nd continued in 2018, he forgot about his interest in international-relations, diplomacy, and geopolitics.
Do the allegations of abuse against Woody Allen deserve a place in the "history of Wokeness"? It seems that is the implication of this post.
The dates are interesting here: The first modern-era allegation against Woody Allen dates to 2013. Dylan Farrow, one of ten adopted daughters of Mia Farrow, accused Woody Allen in Vanity Fair, Oct. 2013.
(By late 2013, the same time as the first serious anti-Woody Allen allegation in this century, Steve Sailer was waving his arms at passers-by, vigorously trying to flag people down, with the aim of drawing attention to what he had identified as an incipient politicized Transgenderist movement. Almost no one took serious the early signs, in 2013 to 2014, but Sailer did and was right. By late 2015, the outline of the "Trans" movement had begun to take shape, political-cultural beach-heads had been established. The "social contagion" would begin to be seen in earnest within a few years. Normal-thinkers of the early 2010s would've been shocked to get a mental blast from the late 2010s.)
By early 2016, Ronan Farrow is on board with the anti-Woody Allen allegations and endorsing them and promoting them.
What, if anything, had changed in the culture between ca.2010 and ca.2015?
------
And : right in the same timeline, an anniversary perhaps worth marking:
Nov. 19, 2024 ----- this is the exact 10th anniversary of the publication of the influential "A Rape on Campus" story appearing in Rolling Stone magazine (published Nov. 19, 2014).
The entire thing was soon debunked by Steve Sailer as a hoax. Few others were as early or as active in debunking the allegations. Rolling Stone sheepishly "retracted" the article a few months after being discredited and then disproven
People didn't know it at the time, but the UVa rape-hoax story -- (really, the attitudes and views "in the air" in which that story was born and went through to publication) -- set the tone for the coming years, in important ways. And that at a time when Donald Trump was tweeting frivolities about Diet Coke.
The UVa rape-hoax story today, at the ten-year mark, almost seems unremarkable. Less than four years later you had the wacko anti-Kavanaugh allegations.
The individual hoaxer behind the University of Virginia "rape hoax" of 2014, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, it seems landed on her feet and is doing fine, more-or-less.
As I think about it now, as I look back on it, a strange feeling comes to me: Given "what became of the culture" in the decade after this woman published her anti-White Male hate-hoax article back there on November 19, 2014, it 'almost' feels too much to blame Sabrina Rubin Erdely for her action.
Yes, she was wrong to perpetrate a hate hoax on us. Yes, I can imagine her motivations and her (un)ethical thought-process as she prepared the hoax. Yes, it is wrong and should be condemned. But a decade of water under the bridge shows that she was not an aberration. More of an early adopter of a bad trend, or a symbol of the emergent spirit of the mid-2010s to early 2020s.
I've heard a tape of Sabrina Rubin Erdely of Rolling Stone and UVA coed Jackie Coakley talking. The younger woman seemed like the dominant personality, with Erdely going along with whatever nonsense Coakley makes up because Erdely dutifully believes everything she reads in the newspapers about the Rape on Campus Crisis promoted by the Obama Administration.
I loved Woody Allen s “ Midnight in Paris” also his remake of “ A Streetcar Named Desire” - only the Bernie Maldoff Ponzi scheme J was recast as a WASP played by Alec Baldwin
Owen Wilson was very charming in his own way . Not really Woody Allen certainly not in a physical way . I loved “midnight in Paris “ no Algerians or n modern Paris just authentic romantic French and ugly Americans Owen s Girlfriend boob parents , ugly Americans . I love this movie
Ferguson? mistake?
Thanks.
Where you say Dylan, you mean Ronan.
Thanks.
no one asked for it, but here's my allen top 10:
crimes & misdemeanors
purple rose of cairo
midnight in paris
annie hall
blue jasmine
match point
radio days
hannah and her sisters
broadway danny rose
interiors
i keep meaning to pick up his memoir. i've heard it's quite a good read.
Take the money and run was hilarious.
haven't seen it. not available in the streaming world, unfortunately, or i'd check it out tonight.
i'm a bit on the fence with most of the early comedies. the only one i remember really enjoying was sleeper.
i think his prime was ... let's say 85 to 89. crimes.... & purple rose are his greatest achievements, and everything else he did in that era was at minimum really good.
If you’d like sleeper you’d love it. It’s by far his funniest movie.
It's been a long time but wasn't that when the great leader's nose was cloned and it was Allen's nose.
It’s on YouTube
thanks! i've added it to my watchlist.
hannah and her sisters and crimes & misdemeanors are head and shoulders above the rest
Steve, I was hoping you would write something about Sean Combs and the ability of famous black men to get away with more than famous white men.
Who doesn’t know that? What’s there to add?
Quite consistent across all males is the fact that they're very reluctant to accept that those who look similar to them may be sexual predators or abusers. Considering most victims are likely of the same race, it's up to individual communities to report or hold these people accountable. A lot of men and some women would simply prefer to protect the peace. In my years at a PWI I remember the community taking action against one Indian and one Black rapist. Of course, there were many whites with some poor reputations, but I don't remember the community coming together like they did in those cases. I consider myself consistent when it comes to these kind of accusations and promptly stopped associating with the accuse, but what do I know.
I’m not convinced plastic surgery could undo Woody’s genes that well.
At the moment, the presumption is Woody has no bio children. So, taking in history it's probable that Ronan's Sinatra's. Besides, one can kind of understand Mia if she adopts that many with his consent, and he then walks out. Things can get ugly downstream...
I have managed to avoid seeing any movie with Woody Allen and nothing I read here makes me likely to change that.
There always has to be that person who is too cool for school.
His 80s movies are all great. His 70s movies are scattershot, Annie Hall and Sleeper are great and the reluctant sperm sequence from Everything You wanted to Know About Sex is one of the most hilarious bits ever filmed. Since then his movies are more hit or miss.
I first watched Woody Allen's 70's movies as a horny, hormone-raging teenager in the late 70s, so those early comedies (Sleeper, Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted To Know...) were the ones that imprinted on me. Tried to watch Annie Hall but thought it was boring, but that was young me. I need to check out his 80s output and reassess; thanks for the insight.
we've lived parallel movie-watching lives
And that person was never you, little Soros-boy.
If I have never seen something, read something, listened to something, I feel no need to brag about it.
R. G., try not to get obsessed with delusions about whom people in comments really must be.
I've never seen "ET the Extra Terrestrial" and I'll probably take that to my grave.
The "You haven't seen _____!" is actually a pretty fun game to play with family and friends. Everyone has movies that people of their age/sex/status should have seen but haven't. For example, one of my adult male friends had never seen any Indiana Jones movie, and he refused for decades to see it after we (his friends) discovered this fact because he loved the frustration and reaction it caused.
In 1989, when I was first dating my future wife, we saw a lot of movies. Since we married in 1991, we've seen very few movies. The only time I ever took my wife out to the movies was to watch "Master and Commander." I had to. I've read all the novels.
I recently finished my fifth reading of the novels. The movie was good, but I wish it had been great.
I read all the O'Brian novels. But I have each on audiobook and have been through the series three or four times. It is a rewarding adventure.
I hadn't seen "Home Alone" until maybe 2018. My dad never saw Star Wars, which mystified me as a kid. Why would you not want to see the most amazing movie of all time? Of course now I get it. Why would an adult, used to 1970s cinema, be excited for that? Of course he did see "Return of the Jedi" because some business connection got us tix to the Chicago premier.
Even Dad loved "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
Once again, someone who is too cool for school. One look up the top 100 movies on IMDB and virtually everyone has seen less than 50.
If our artists are going to be moralists, prudes, censors, scolds, witch hunters and brittle conformists, what do we even have them for?
Give me Polanski, Celine, Pound, Picasso, Roth etc etc and all the other famous freaks, maniacs, bigots and rampaging phalli of the past any day—they may have broken laws and mores and bones but they built new worlds and lasting works of consequence.
Frank Sinatra's illegitimate son is almost as lame, fake and gay as Fidel Castro's illegitimate Canadian son—the conquering hero has given way to the sensitive scold. From rooster to capon in one generation.
Caravaggio: mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but one of the top few most important painters in history.
"mad, bad, and dangerous to know" !
I didn't even think of Byron—Lady Caroline Lamb never forgave him after she sent him a packet of her pubes and he refused to reciprocate. She made him even more famous.
And Byron is why Dracula was a count. I guess he was the Aldous Snow of his day
he was the Elvis of his day!
I don't know Elvis deeply but I get the impression he got a lot of tail by being good looking famous and kind of well meaning aw shucks country sincere. Byron was something darker and drove the ladies mad. He also supposedly brought a bear into his college dorm room because they had a rule against dogs.
I think the arc of Elvis' life demonstrates that he was a young, talented, yet naive man, who, after having spent his adult life being manipulated in the entertainment industry, became cynical and jaded in his later years.
I compare Byron to Elvis because he was (maybe) the first international celebrity and because there were entire industries (in his case books, journals and newspapers) that tracked his every movement, spread all sorts of gossip about him and obsessively chronicled his every romantic adventure (whether true or false). (Byron, also like Elvis, never had a single friend who didn't try to cash in w some kind of memoir about him.)
Also Byron and Elvis were both strikingly beautiful men who drove the ladies crazy, but who spent the latter years of their short lives trying to live down/transcend their reputations as wild Adonises, but whose image overpowered (and outlived) any of their best work.
It's a fun parallel, but obviously only goes so far.
Nature is healing. All thanks to the God-Emperor.
I agree! It means your daughter, sister and mother will wear yoga pants in public outlining their private parts. Do away with religious prudery and bring on the sluttery of Clever Pseudonym's female relatives! Hell yeah!
the topic is art, film and literature not ugly clothing. in fact, more restrictive norms and mores have always produced the more adventurous forms of expression. the age of mass man and mass media has produced mass gluttony and slobbery but it was the age of the aristocrats that built lasting art and culture. we should all be prudes in public and wild sluts on the page...
Here's what a Russian Orthodox priest wrote after viewing a gallery of young Picasso's latest work...in 1918. https://jawbone99.substack.com/p/the-corpse-of-beauty
There is more to the picture than meets the eye...and then some.
wow thanks that was great
I mean, that's what happens when you have queer women in charge of the culture. Even heterosexual women like bad boys, but while lesbians can't exterminate men, if they emasculate them they have a better chance at the bisexuals.
I'm sympathetic to Woody Allen, but I don't like Annie Hall because Diane Keaton reminds me too much of my sister and daughter and I would seriously want to kick Woody's ass if he was dating either one.
The problem I have with Hannah and Her Sisters is that when the movie I was dating a beautiful women who could have been a doppelganger for Barbara Hershey. She dumped me a week before I saw the movie which left me really depressed.
That's too bad. It's my favorite. It has amazing rewatchability. Such a hopeful mess.
Maybe Woody's real talent is pushing our buttons at the "personal" emotional level.
Only if you're Jewish or of a Jewish-mindset.
Allen's greatest talent is putting the Boomer Jewish Id on screen for all the world to see and becoming famous for it. Sex-obsessed, morally bankrupt, and shallow pretending to be deep.
OT, but likely of interest to Steve and others, huge gaps between murder rates as reported in death certificates vs FBI numbers: https://www.justfactsdaily.com/fbi-biden-era-murder-estimates-homicides-death-certificates
I believe it was 2022 when the FBI murder count got seriously out of sync with the CDC homicide count.
I mostly work with CDC numbers. The interface is solid and they don't seem to have screwy results.
When you work with their raw data, CDC is awesome. I watched ILI-net through 2020. As 'cases' surged, the number of people presenting with symptoms at clinics and emergency rooms fell below epidemic baseline in mid-May, and stayed there.
Woody Allen turns 90 in 12.5 months.
It's interesting that his name still pops up "in the culture," in a current-day (or quasi-current-day) sense.
IMDB lists twelve directorial credits for Woody Allen, released since he turned 75 in 2010 (and thirteen writing credits, usually in the same films).
The Ngram AmEng corpus suggests people put Woody Allen's name in published material a steady rate between the late 1980s and late 2010s. (After a steady rise between 1965 and ca.1985.) Starting ca.1986 and over the following ca. 35, there was no real downtrend in "Woody Allen mentions." Even by the time he turned eighty (Nov. 2015), still no downtrend. Maybe there will be one evident in the early-2020s (but Ngram is always unreliable on the most-recent years).
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Woody+Allen&year_start=1955&year_end=2020&corpus=en-US&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false
Woody Allen's ancestors were Eastern European Jews who arrived in the 1890s and took part in the by-then-ongoing process of taking control of New York City (signs of Woody Allen's ancestors' education and abilities were that at least some of them could speak full-on proper German in addition to Yiddish).
Here in the 2020s, 130 years later, the influence of the mid-1880s to mid-1910s movement, of Jews from Eastern Europe to the USA (and subsequent top-ups over the rest of the 20th century) remains so decisive-seeming to the course of U.S. culture and power-dynamics. Yet also a kind of taboo within the USA.
Allen, like Clint Eastwood, has never stopped working, so every new crop of film executives and producers, no matter how dumb or inexperienced, has recent knowledge of their films. And Allen, for all his evil flaws, has good talent and knows if he just keeps churning things out, he will be able to pump out a good one every now and then.
Allen did have a good quote once: "Half of life is just showing up." In showbizness especially, lots of people are flaky and the deals fall through or contracts aren't fulfill,ed and many things are thus delayed/late/not on time/skipped, causing expense or replacement, so someone like Allen who gets a reputation of reliability, durability, and things coming in under-budget is valuable. Allen's movies will not lose you money, will get done on time, and will get decent critical acclaim. Before his moral depravity became a liability he was a safe bet.
P.S. It also hasn't hurt that Allen's movies are about sex-obsessed upper-middle class American Boomer Jews having sexcapade adventures in NYC (or other places where Boomer Jews like to visit). Since lots of his contemporary critics, financiers, and producers fit that bill and lots of American Boomer Jews will line up to see movies about themselves, Allen has a niche that guarantees him good reviews and profitable box office returns on any movie that isn't horrendous.
My impression is that quite a few of Woody's later movies around the turn of the century lost his backers money, but a highly limited amount (e.g., $2 million) which they could afford in return for being able to tell their friends they were investors in a Woody Allen movie.
It would have been nice if Whit Stillman had had that kind of support. But a lot of artists aren't as stable as Allen at showing up every damn day.
Allen's background as a playwright and the fact that he famously never moved to LA or got trapped in the studio system also helped. Since Allen's movies are talk-fests with verbal wordplay, don't rely on special effects, and aren't expected to be the #1 movie of the year, and he doesn't have studio-dinks leaning over his shoulder forcing reshoots, the budget stays down. Allen is at home with bare stages and uses the scenery of NYC only as enhancement.
Allen mostly films on location in NYC rather than using studio-built sets, which at first would seem more expensive. However, Allen is quite knowledgeable about NYC, as he lives there and hangs out there and thus he's already scouted his locations in his mind long before a film is made. Ergo he can keep the budget down because he knows exactly what shots he wants. Also, he doesn't go for fantastic camera work or shots but uses traditional ones, so the expense is down there as well.
John Ford was much the same way except his films had a lot more action. He had the shots all figured out.
Allen movies (the ones I’ve seen) are like Updike novels (the ones I’ve read.) Warnings not to waste any more of the precious minutes of your life on them.
> famous middle-aged men should stay away from high school girls they aren’t going to marry.
They probably should stay away from them even if they would gladly marry them; there is a reason why American Beauty* is now seen as distasteful even though it was lauded when it was released.
> Rebecca Hall: I don’t think that we should be the ones who are doing judge and jury on this.
I am still of the opinion that the Democratic Party owes Al Franken an apology, as he might have been president in 2+ months if he wasn't MeTooëd. Of course Minnesota was going to elect another Democrat to replace him so no one was going to fight too hard for him in 2018. While Norm Coleman won in this century he was running against a dead man; it's hard to believe that in the entirety of the 80s Minnesota had TWO Republican US Senators in David Durenberger and Rudy Boschwitz
*If you haven't seen it, it is still worth watching, even though Kevin Spacey overacts a bit
The Al Franken cancellation was ridiculous
And he was quite a sport about it
Frankengroper deserved it.
Yes, it's amazing how he didn't push back at all. Like a good Democrat he just took one for the team so they could win that special election in 2017 for the senate seat in Alabama (Doug Jones [D] vs Roy Moore [R]). Even though Jones won that race, he ended up losing to Tommy Tuberville in 2020 anyway, negating the point of his immolation.
As an aside, I think covid warped my sense of time, as that special election seems a lot longer than 7 years ago.
Franken exemplifies one of my heuristics-- an idealist or a man who wants to hold on to his principles, can't last in politics. If you want to argue your guy is one of the good guys, acting on principle, he'd better be a first term congressman. People who make a lifelong career of it have to be scumbags. The system will dump you on your ass if you try to stay good
Al Franken, an idealist?
in that he ran on principles and hoped to make positive change based on them, yes
Guy claims to be a feminist and he's goofing on sleeping women by appearing to sexually grope them for a secret photo to embarrass them?
Franken's hypocrisy abounds here. This wasn't Opie & Anthony, who openly disdained feminism and made dirty jokes about women as a challenge to the culture; this was some guy who claims to be some kind of "deep thinker" on politics, claims the left-wing mantle, and promotes feminazism. You can't be a male feminist and then try to have it both ways by doing locker room-type pranks on women. (Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules...)
Its why people accepted Trump's "grab 'em by the p******" excuse as locker room talk, because Trump has never embraced feminism on his platform or in his public persona. There's videos of him flirting and treating women as women and not feminist equals.
Franken got hoisted on his own hypocritical petard.
P.S. One hilarious moment before Frankengroper ran away and resigned was when a group of female former SNL hacks wrote a letter claiming Frankengroper had never acted inappropriately with them so therefore this was all overblown/fake. Well, yeah, because you SNL hacks were far less attractive than the chick Frankengroper made it look like he groped.
There have been several waves of feminism. The one that was in when Franken was growing up wasn't officially against humor.
"That's not funny!" has been a trope about feminists for forever. The humorless, dour, fun-time-ruining suffragette has been a staple of history.
Also, Feminism=communism, and was always this evil. So Frankengroper can get wrecked with his "it wasn't like this before" argument. He promoted this b.s. and he rightfully got stabbed by the scorpion he was escorting across the river.
I think #MeToo was when I pretty much gave up on love and started completely distrusting the opposite sex. (I think this may actually be a gift to the women of the world, or as Stephen King said in a very different context, 'No great loss'.)
But yeah, Franken was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's probably better for the country he wouldn't have been president--he was quite left-wing and smart and competent. I don't think he had the charisma for it to really become President though. Short dorky Jewish guy for President? Nah. They're happy to let guys like that write the manuals but they don't let them fly the plane.
"Allen’s presumed son Ronan Farrow...[has] gotten himself a lot of plastic surgery so that he looks more like his conception of who his real father must be (in his mind), Mia’s first husband Frank Sinatra, rather than Woody."
After all this time he hasn't been talked into doing a DNA-paternity test?
His pre-plastic-surgery pictures all suggest Allen (or someone with similar phenotype).
Ronan Farrow has published two books:
(1.) "War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence," W. W. Norton & Co., 2018.
(2.) "Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators," Little, Brown & Co., 2019.
The second book followed his 2017-18 writing about Harvey Weinstein and other cases of alleged sex abuse and exploitation (his early targets were more often Jews than not, but not always).
In the flurry of excitement after the "#MeToo" movement began in late 2017 a nd continued in 2018, he forgot about his interest in international-relations, diplomacy, and geopolitics.
Do the allegations of abuse against Woody Allen deserve a place in the "history of Wokeness"? It seems that is the implication of this post.
The dates are interesting here: The first modern-era allegation against Woody Allen dates to 2013. Dylan Farrow, one of ten adopted daughters of Mia Farrow, accused Woody Allen in Vanity Fair, Oct. 2013.
(By late 2013, the same time as the first serious anti-Woody Allen allegation in this century, Steve Sailer was waving his arms at passers-by, vigorously trying to flag people down, with the aim of drawing attention to what he had identified as an incipient politicized Transgenderist movement. Almost no one took serious the early signs, in 2013 to 2014, but Sailer did and was right. By late 2015, the outline of the "Trans" movement had begun to take shape, political-cultural beach-heads had been established. The "social contagion" would begin to be seen in earnest within a few years. Normal-thinkers of the early 2010s would've been shocked to get a mental blast from the late 2010s.)
By early 2016, Ronan Farrow is on board with the anti-Woody Allen allegations and endorsing them and promoting them.
What, if anything, had changed in the culture between ca.2010 and ca.2015?
------
And : right in the same timeline, an anniversary perhaps worth marking:
Nov. 19, 2024 ----- this is the exact 10th anniversary of the publication of the influential "A Rape on Campus" story appearing in Rolling Stone magazine (published Nov. 19, 2014).
The entire thing was soon debunked by Steve Sailer as a hoax. Few others were as early or as active in debunking the allegations. Rolling Stone sheepishly "retracted" the article a few months after being discredited and then disproven
People didn't know it at the time, but the UVa rape-hoax story -- (really, the attitudes and views "in the air" in which that story was born and went through to publication) -- set the tone for the coming years, in important ways. And that at a time when Donald Trump was tweeting frivolities about Diet Coke.
The UVa rape-hoax story today, at the ten-year mark, almost seems unremarkable. Less than four years later you had the wacko anti-Kavanaugh allegations.
The individual hoaxer behind the University of Virginia "rape hoax" of 2014, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, it seems landed on her feet and is doing fine, more-or-less.
As I think about it now, as I look back on it, a strange feeling comes to me: Given "what became of the culture" in the decade after this woman published her anti-White Male hate-hoax article back there on November 19, 2014, it 'almost' feels too much to blame Sabrina Rubin Erdely for her action.
Yes, she was wrong to perpetrate a hate hoax on us. Yes, I can imagine her motivations and her (un)ethical thought-process as she prepared the hoax. Yes, it is wrong and should be condemned. But a decade of water under the bridge shows that she was not an aberration. More of an early adopter of a bad trend, or a symbol of the emergent spirit of the mid-2010s to early 2020s.
I've heard a tape of Sabrina Rubin Erdely of Rolling Stone and UVA coed Jackie Coakley talking. The younger woman seemed like the dominant personality, with Erdely going along with whatever nonsense Coakley makes up because Erdely dutifully believes everything she reads in the newspapers about the Rape on Campus Crisis promoted by the Obama Administration.
I loved Woody Allen s “ Midnight in Paris” also his remake of “ A Streetcar Named Desire” - only the Bernie Maldoff Ponzi scheme J was recast as a WASP played by Alec Baldwin
"Midnight in Paris" was a delight. For some reason, Owen Wilson was utterly charming as the Woody Allen Character.
Owen Wilson was very charming in his own way . Not really Woody Allen certainly not in a physical way . I loved “midnight in Paris “ no Algerians or n modern Paris just authentic romantic French and ugly Americans Owen s Girlfriend boob parents , ugly Americans . I love this movie
Also the attempt to give it some Bay Area atmosphere felt forced.
Radio Days … beautiful . I wish I lived in New York City ~ 1946