The Guardian offered one of the strangest review/non-review defense/non-defenses of Woody Allen I've seen. He's been good for actresses - except he doesn't direct them, they direct themselves, because he's lazy, and a leper in the current landscape (and by the way, his daughter's 35 years younger, in case you'd missed that in 1000 articles).
Who is this funny/not funny bespectacled man? And is it forgivable that he largely gave us Diane Keaton, Diane Wiest, Mia Farrow, and a few other unlikely female icons over the years? Consider the usual casting process for movies where the actresses are more for sexual enticement than spouting dialogue, and then consider his creative batch who got perhaps 3-5x as many lines per film as the typical LA bombshell, and then consider the wave of assaults behind stage - when Woody's crime here seems to be that he's too lazy and boring and disinterested to even make a pass at his starlets.
I haven't been interested enough in Allen to follow his last 20 years very close (the film with Ewan McGregor seemed bad enough that I didn't finish), but I do think he brings out some curious paradoxes in people, where they hope for intellectualism and recoil from it at the same time, where they want women's progress but can't find any characters among 3.5 billion to promote it...
I'm especially amazed by the case of Mia Farrow, who would likely have been a dud in the hands of any other actor (she rather sleepwalks through Polanski's (is there an irony in directors she's worked with?) Rosemary's Baby, though I suppose she wowed in Peyton Place - anyway, a question whether she would have made it out of the 60's otherwise).
Anyway, just thought this curious, & thought I would share.