I'd love it if we could keep discussions of, um, current events to the other thread.  This one is about the movies...

You can condition your tastes.  I believe that.  But what I love most about art, high and low, is that it gives us an opportunity to be honest about our reactions to things without the stakes getting too high.  What I love most about comedy is that as an audience member, you can't fake it.  Watching comedy is like having sex.  You can try to be polite but if the other person is paying attention they know whether or not they got a laugh.

My life as a Woody Allen audience member goes back to high school.  I was trying to write, even then.  I freelanced for The Albuquerque Tribune so I was making money writing at a young age and always had an eye on the biographies of young male writers who started out hanging around in news rooms and the like, skipping the educational component for real experiences with words, people and deadlines. I also wrote a lot of mostly bad science fiction and was marginally into theatre.  I came across a Neil Simon play called God's Favorite, a modern retelling of the Book of Job and still very funny the way Neil Simon always is (edgeless but skillful).  I wrote my own short story, senior year of high school called Gods Younger Brother, a retelling of genesis starring God's younger and less powerful brother Gosh who darned the souls of his enemies to Heck where they were tormented by Satin, Lord of Lingerie and Undergarments who was, for some reason, described as Ross Perot in drag.  My senior year English teacher read it at my request and told me it would make a better play.  He then gave me a copy of Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth and also a copy of Woody Allen's Without Feathers.

I did turn the story into a play and I presented the first scene of it at the end of senior year as part of the theatre showcase.  I directed it myself.  It went over very well.  My girlfriend loved it.  Impressing girls is the important part of the endeavor.  But I am getting ahead of myself. The play wound up changing my life as it was a finalist for the Young Playwrights' Festival in 1994, which caused me to change my major from biology to theatre in exchange for a scholarship and stipend. But, back to high school English.

We were all assigned a year long project following a writer where we would put together a series of critical papers, biographies and presentations.  The teacher hand picked the assignments, based on the students.  I was jealous when my best friend got Mark Twain because I took it as a sign that the teacher consideredd him, not me, the real wit and writer.  I got Woody Allen and was told to start with Crimes and Misdemeanors.

This is a real novel of a movie.  The plot and themes are layered.  It bears repeated watching.  The cast is terrific, especially Martin Landau.  As I grew up, I'd gravitate more towards the existential issues of the movie.  It is about a man who gets away with a murder of convenience.  Getting away with the murder also allows him to get away with adultery and embezzlement.  But I was mostly attracted to the subplot where Woody's character, trapped in a loveless marriage, attempts to win Mia Farrow's heart even as she is falling for a somewhat despicable sitcom show runner played by Alan Alda who is not, in the end, as milquetoast an actor as people like to joke.

It is the nerd trying to win the pretty girl from the cool kid, but set in high tones.  I can see why I was attracted to that particular story, even though the nerd loses in the end.  One thing you learn is that the cool kid actually has a lot going for him.  Nothing is so black and white.  Allen's character is a documentary film maker, working on the biographer of a philosopher who I believe is based on Rollo May.  The philosopher has all the answers.  Then he jumps out a window. Maybe there is more truth in Alda's TV sitcoms.  They do not, after all, end in death.

Well, this opened the portal for me.  I read the rest of the prose collections and all of his plays.  I bought a cassette of his stand up from the 1960s.  I researched Allen's biography.  He was as self made as you could get, working up from the writing crew for Sid Caesar and pounding the boards as a stand up.  I loved that he wrote, and wrote well, in every medium.  From then on, I would gravitate to other writers who were similarly versatile (Steve Martin comes to mind).

I dug back into the films, starting with What's New, Pussycat for which he contributed to the screenplay and then the early comedies.  Love and Death, the send up of Russian novels, became my favorite and I developed a crush on Diane Keaton.  Annie Hall taught me about adult relationships and Hannah and Her Sisters had me quoting ee Cummings to girls I liked ("nobody, not even the rain...")

This was all around when the news of the divorce and Soon-Yi was happening.  Husbands and Wives was the contemporary movie.  I loved it.  I had never seen anything like it, really.  It was a documentary of sorts, filmed on handheld cameras.  Judy Davis was just this hard, strong and attractive woman.  Yes, Woody kisses Juliet Lewis in a penthouse during a lightning storm.  It was sexy and provocative.

Yes, theme of younger women shows up a lot. Partly it's tied to the themes of infidelity, which is as much part of life in Allen's world as it is in Philip Roth's or John Updike's.  So is older men and younger women.  I understand the urge to read this as confessional.  It may be.  There is also, though, some artistic intent at work here -- he is pushing social boundaries and, if you think about it, is going even where other controversial film makers won't.

Now, there's a great takedown of the 70s era Allen movies by Joan Didion here that fans and nonfans alike should read.  She attacks his kind of shallow intellectualism.  The movies are, to Didion, just a lot of intellectual name dropping for a certain overeducated and juvenile class of neurotics.  It may be so.  But those people need movies, too!

I also take a different view of this -- all the literature references strewn about and cameos by Marshall McLuhan speaks to a time when the non-specialist could still have meaningful opinions about philosophy and literature.  Allen's work is steeped in middlebrow.  Shakespeare and Greek tragedy is for everybody.  This is even the point of Bullets Over Broadway where the mob hit man is a better playwright than the intellectual.

In any event, over the years I saw almost all of his movies when they opened, wherever I was.  Deconstructing Harry was one of my favorites -- a kind of misanthropic romp through psychology and fantasy. 

The latest, Blue Jasmine explores fate and success in America with Cate Blanchett playing a woman who lived in excess as the wife of a real estate Ponzi schemer, only to be brought low by the law. To me it seemed vital and contemporary (some of his movies do, I admit, seem lost in time).

I have taken a great deal of inspiration from all of this.  He has made a movie a year, sometimes more, since he started with Take the Money and Run (which has one of my favorite visual gags of prisoners escaping a chain gang disguised as an immense charm bracelet).  Nobody has matched this output.  This is why I consider him America's Shakespeare -- he works and works and works.  The culture changes, media changes, the movie business has changed and he doesn't stop.  It's a real success story that I will always admire.