Woody Allen

Started by Pedro, March 20, 2003, 11:46:16 PM

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

godardian

Quote from: samsong on May 11, 2006, 05:47:32 PM
i really love Sweet and Lowdown.

This is a spontaneous post, but I agree it's worth saying. It was probably his last really up-to-par film until Match Point (though I certainly thought Melinda and Melinda found Woody getting back on track).

As an aside, there's a girl who looks a lot like Samantha Morton who works in the Italian gourmet-goods shop in my neighborhood. When I said this to her, she had no idea who Morton was.  :yabbse-sad: I demanded she rent up Morvern Callar post-haste.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

Alethia

it really saddens me that more people dont like small time crooks.  and fuck melinda and melinda.

modage

people don't like it because it's terrible.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Fernando

I'm not one of those ppl, I love small time crooks and as a matter of fact is one of my fave flims of his, I know that it isn't among his best work but I really like it, and the same goes to The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.

As for Sweet and Lowdown, that I say is among his best work without a doubt, and visually is also amazing.

godardian

If I had to choose between Sweet and Lowdown and Small Time Crooks, I would choose the former. But that doesn't mean I thought Small Time Crooks was a bad movie; in fact, I quite enjoyed it at the time, assuming it was a little dessert movie, Woody giving himself a little break and keeping his body of work diverse.

I think the really steep drop-off point was Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Now that is a bad movie. It may be my least favorite of all of his.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

samsong

but do you really love pie?  exactly.

i like Small Time Crooks, too.  it's funny.  tracy ullman? ELAINE MAY?! gold.  it's inconsequential, sure, but it's also harmless and endearing and a lot of fun to watch. 

polkablues

Small Time Crooks had a very funny first half, and a very boring and unfunny second half. 

Maybe it was Woody's homage to Full Metal Jacket, I don't know.
My house, my rules, my coffee

Pubrick

Quote from: polkablues on May 12, 2006, 07:50:57 PM
Small Time Crooks had a very funny first half, and a very boring and unfunny second half. 

Maybe it was Woody's homage to Full Metal Jacket, I don't know.
jesus, first HULK and now this.

---------------------best taste in everything---------------------------------------------------------

[polkas former ranking]























--------------rags on HULK, FMJ, likes Family Guy, thinks Thrindle is a good catch-----------------

[polka's current standing]



















--------------------------------point of no return---------------------------------

[soon, when he confesses his belief that Orlando Whom is the greatest, most charismatic leading man of our time]
under the paving stones.

polkablues

Seriously, I just said that 'cause I knew it would set you off.  I like Full Metal Jacket.

But let's look at this critically... Hulk: as good as most of that movie was, you gotta admit it ended ridiculously.  Family Guy: lots of perfectly reasonable people like Family Guy.  Just don't make me try and name any of them.  Thrindle: crazy Canadian girl who knows where her G-spot is.  I'm batting 1.000 so far.

And for your information, I would defend Orlando Bloom vehemently, if I could remember any moment of any performance I've ever seen him in...

But let's get back to Small Time Crooks, about which my taste is inarguable.  Here's a short synopsis of the film:
:yabbse-smiley:  :-D  :lol:  :rofl:  :yabbse-cheesy:  :?  :yabbse-undecided:  :yabbse-tongue:  :roll:  :sleeping:
My house, my rules, my coffee

MacGuffin

Colin Farrell starring in Woody Allen's next?

Woody Allen has signed a typically A-grade cast, including Colin Farrell, Tom Wilkinson and Ewan McGregor, to headline his next – characteristically, untitled still – movie.

The film, set to be shot in the U.K, was quickly hobbled together after Allen's Paris-set project, which was set to star Michelle Williams and David Krumholtz, fell apart at the seams.

According to the ABC, the project will shoot in the Summer. It's Allen's third film to be shot in London, following the critically acclaimed "Match Point", and the upcoming "Scoop".

More details when they come to hand.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks


godardian

Quote from: Just Withnail on May 18, 2006, 06:58:39 AM
Quote from: MacGuffin on May 17, 2006, 11:15:06 AM
Tom Wilkinson and Ewan McGregor starring in Woody Allen's next?

Cool

That is pretty cool, but I was excited about Michelle Williams and am still getting over my disappointment.  :violin:
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

MacGuffin

Woody Allen Loses Fight Over Movie Editing

Woody Allen, in another legal fight with two former friends and producers he accused of cheating him out of $12 million, has lost a skirmish over what versions of six of his movies will be shown on television and in airplanes.

State Supreme Court Justice Bernard Fried ruled that terms of a settlement of a lawsuit Allen filed against Jean Doumanian, his former producer and friend of 30 years, allow her to develop the television and in-flight versions of "Bullets over Broadway," "Mighty Aphrodite," "Everyone Says I Love You," "Deconstructing Harry," "Celebrity" and "Sweet and Lowdown."

The fight over the modified versions stems from the 2001 lawsuit Allen filed against Doumanian, Jacqui Safra, her personal and professional partner, and their production company, Sweetland Films.

Allen, 70, alleged that Doumanian and Safra refused to give him an earnings report for eight films, including the six currently in dispute, and had cheated him out of as much as $12 million.

After a nine-day trial in 2002, the parties settled the lawsuit without revealing the terms of their agreement.

But the judge's decision, made public Thursday, said one settlement provision says that if the parties disagree over how to edit Allen's films to meet television standards the matter would be submitted to Manhattan's state Supreme Court for resolution.

They sent the matter to the court in 2004 after Allen objected to Doumanian's cuts and her decision to replace words rather than bleeping them out. But the judge agreed with Doumanian, who had argued that television networks generally did not accept Allen's approach.

Allen's lawyer, Michael Zweig, said the filmmaker had not decided whether to appeal.

"We now respectfully disagree with Judge Fried's decision and believe that, in any case, any future effort by the producers to modify the films will not, in the long run, prove attractive or commercially viable," Zweig said.

Doumanian's lawyer, Stephen Hayes, referred calls to publicist Dan Klores, who was not immediately available for comment.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

EXCLUSIVE: Woody Allen Stops To Smell the "Books"
Source: TMZ.com

Alejandro Agresti's "The Lake House" opens nationwide this weekend, reuniting Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, so we thought it a good time to catch up with the fascinating Argentinian emigre director at home in Holland.

When I rang him up at his home in Holland this morning, Agresti was still a bit jetlagged from the American premiere of the film in L.A. But not so tired that he couldn't share with me some exciting news about his next film, "The Scent of Books.": Based on his novel of the same name, it's about three writers, now in their 60s, who receive an inheritance of 20,000 rare, first edition books from their mentor. And, TMZ is happy to be the first to report, both Woody Allen and Christopher Plummer are in negotiations to star as two of the writers. If scheduling proves workable, it will be the first film Allen stars in but doesn't direct in fifteen years, back when he starred in Paul Mazursky's "Scenes from a Mall." (Allen's newest directing and acting effort, "Scoop" premieres at the Venice Film Festival in late August, which felicitiously puts him in Europe for a September start to principal photography on "Books".) Both Cillian Murphy ("Red Eye") and Jason Biggs ("American Pie") are also in negotiations to star as the younger selves of two of the once-idealistic novelists.

"I'm interested in how memory distorts things, how we sometimes we so radically change that we become traitors to our own ideas," explains Agresti, "but inside yourself, you still have this forgotten person. These characters try, without a map, to go and find that (forgotten) person."

It's a feeling that Agresti is familiar with. The son of an Italian father and a Czech mother, he was born in Argentina and came of age during the military coup of the late 1970's, when Eva Peron was forced from power and replaced by an economically incompetent, politically corrupt and dissident-murdering military regime.

"It bore a certain similarity to Nazi Germany," says Agresti, "in that most of the people were happy with these sons-of-bitches, but today, everyone says they were against them."

Like thousands of other Argentinians, Agresti lost close friends and lovers who were "disappeared" into political prisons and often mass graves reserved for those who spoke out against the junta. Then-members of the young communists federation, both his girlfriend and several close friends were hunted down and "disappeared" by the government. At the age of 20, he fled for Europe, determined to make films.

After arriving in Paris, Agresti was told he could couch-surf at a friend's place "anytime." When he showed up, however, the friend was on holiday for two weeks, and Agresti spent the next ten days sleeping in a Parisian phone booth.

"I had this huge bag with all the rushes from my 16mm movie, which I used as a kind of mattress at night," recalls Agresti, "but during the day, you don't, you don't know what to do, so you just keep walking. It was so heavy, about 80 pounds of film, but what impelled me was a kind of revenge for everything that happened (back home.) I thought of showing it in festivals, of meeting great directors. I was dreaming, of course."

Today, Agresti is rubbing elbows with great directors, and though he has the acceptance of Hollywood, he's not so eager to return its embrace. "The Scent of Books," while attracting a top-flight cast, isn't a project that Agresti is keen to make with an American studio. Agresti says he's taking the money he made from "The Lake House" and using part of it to make his next movie, with the help of the same Dutch financier who financed his 2000 art house hit, "Valentin."

"It's difficult to work with a studio on every project, because there's always 'an intervention' about things, a committee full of people with notes. It's difficult to work with a studio when you wrote the novel, wrote the script, and are going to direct it yourself," he pauses, laughing, "But they can buy it when we're done!"
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Allen Picks Female Lead; No One Has Heard of Her

In a report that surfaced first in European publication Screen Daily, it's been revealed that the female lead in Woody Allen's next film is the little-known Brit Hayley Atwell.

Atwell has done some stage work and also starred in the BBC's The Line Of Beauty; though she's currently filming a pair of new BBC projects, her only major exposure so far seems to have come from that show. That, however, didn't stop Screen International (the parent publication of Screen Daily, which explains the latter's glee at the news) from naming the girl one of their "Stars of Tomorrow" earlier this year. For his part, Allen is fully stoked to have Atwell in his film, and has told the press that he is "going to present her so [we] can see what [he is] talking about." He wants all of us, you see, to "Share [his] enjoyment of her."

The movie, which also stars Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell and Tom Wilkinson, is about "two brothers with financial problems who are persuaded by a third party to turn to a life of crime;" it will shoot in London this summer.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks