Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
`I took a course in speed reading and was able to read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia.” Or “My brain is my second-favourite organ.” These are two gem one-liners from Allen Stewart Konigsberg, who was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York in 1935.
In 1952 Konigsberg changed his name to Woody Allen and the one-time introverted schoolchild who spent most of his time virtually interned in his room practising magic tricks and playing the clarinet, at the age of 16 started sending his best one-liners to United States columnist Walter Winchell.
Winchell was a legend in his own right after being a gossip columnist and initiating a highly successful radio programme that started in the 1930s and survived well into the late 1950s.
Allen found his first exposure through Winchell and went on to become an award- winning and top-grossing stand-up comedian.
His first movie credit was as co-star in and writer of Clive Donner’s campy, psycho- trippy What’s New Pussycat?
The movie had Peter O’Toole as the editor of a fashionable French magazine who beds nearly every woman in town, including Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss and Ursula Andress. Allen appeared as the hero’s friend while Peter Sellers was his even more kinky psychotherapist.
This was the first of Allen’s forays into the world of extra-marital affairs, infidelity and being a clever, amiable male slut.
The following year he created a masterpiece of absurd low-key humour with What’s Up Tiger Lily.
Allen got hold of a Japanese exploitation thriller, added his own dubbing, delightful in-jokes and bad Hollywood gags to replace a search for drugs or kidnapped women with something like bubblegum or porridge, or something equally ridiculous.
He went on to make several slapstick movies, including Sleeper – which cast him as a Village jazz musician/new age food fetishist in 2174 – and Bananas, which had him as a puny New York Jew who becomes the leader of an insurrection in a South American revolution.
All of these early movies involved Allen’s main character, most often played by himself, dealing with political intrigues as well as romantic indelicacies.
In Sleeper, a woman asks him: “You haven’t had sex in 200 years?” He replies: “Two- hundred-and-four, if you count my marriage.”
The major question is whether Allen, who is notably a great filmmaker, really wants to get off sexually with so many young, beautiful women.
Is he giving the intellectual nebbish a place to jerk off, or is it that charm and humour can get one laid?
Allen, not the sexiest man on earth, has made many movies that deal with the problems, and indeed practices, of love and marriage and having extra-marital affairs.
In Crimes and Misdemeanours he had a rich ophthalmologist (played by Martin Landau) trying to kill off his lover (Anjelica Huston) in case his wife (Claire Bloom) finds out about the affair.
And he also did it, without additional laughs, in September, where he investigated the claustrophobic relationship of a disillusioned writer, his paramour and her best friend.
Interiors had a father trade in his depressive wife for a free-wheeling divorcee.
Allen’s movies always contain elements of guilt, sex, death, romanticism and nostalgia.
In his latest effort, Celebrity, Allen seems to have taken exception to the tabloid and world press coverage of his split from Mia Farrow and his marriage to Soon-Yi – Farrow’s adopted daughter and now mother to their own adopted child.
Celebrity is a flawed Woody Allen movie; but if you like his stuff then you’ll be blown away cinematically anyway.
In his director’s notes to the Venice Film Festival, where the film premiered, he said the film was about the phenomenon of celebrity in the US.
Once again Allen deals with themes like fame, love and sexual treachery. And even though he is not present in the film himself, he comes across clearly enough in Kenneth Branagh’s interpretation of Lee Simon, a feature and travel writer who falls out with his wife, played by Judy Davis. In fact, Branagh takes on all the kvetches and mannerisms akin to Allen.
The film also stars Melanie Griffith, South African-born Charlize Theron, Winona Ryder, Leonardo DiCaprio and Joe Mantegna.
Celebrity is a rude assault on the culture of empty fame, a phenomenon that is growing like a plague in the US.
It got a complete slashing in the US press, with Charles Taylor in Salon magazine suggesting that Allen had never been interested in anything other than Allen.
He believes Allen’s attack on celebrities is hypocritical, because he himself is a celebrity.
Yes, Woody Allen is self-absorbed and his movies smack of self-indulgence, but in Celebrity he is right on the button in his critique of a mindless, hedonistic, success-obsessed culture.
Branagh is sometimes embarrasing in his impersonation of Allen, and the film gets a B-plus.
Allen has been plagued by infidelities his entire life; yet his movies are always filled with sparkling dialogue and in jokes.
In Celebrity the joke is entirely funny and, sadly, on Allen himself.