Self-deprecating Jewish Humor: Ill Effects?

[Jazzmoose]

Anybody remember the SCTV episode where Allen decided to cast Hope in one of his films and then...things happened? Rick Moranis as Woody, Dave Thomas as Hope.

I don't remember any of the SCTV episodes. Were they as funny without weed as with?

[Pete C]

I don't remember any of the SCTV episodes. Were they as funny without weed as with?

I think so, though Rick Moranis as Mel Torme may have been a little funnier with.

Edited August 14, 2012 by Pete C

[fasstrack]

All 3 Stooges, plus Shemp, Joe Besser, and their funniest buddies you never heard of couldn't lay a glove on Lewis at physical comedy. The only one approaching his level today is Jim Carrey.

[JSngry]

I don't remember any of the SCTV episodes. Were they as funny without weed as with?

I think so, though Rick Moranis as Mel Torme may have been a little funnier with.

but only marginally...and only if you have even an inkling of a liking for Torme, which I still don't...

[fasstrack]

Jeez, I thought I was the only Torme detractor. He was a great musician, and everything looked good on paper. The man did not reach me is all...

Jeez, I thought I was the only Torme detractor. He was a great musician, and everything looked good on paper. The man did not reach me is all...

[Pete C]

The only one approaching his level today is Jim Carrey.

Let's match up Jerry's telethon to Jim's vaccine denialism...

Jeez, I thought I was the only Torme detractor. He was a great musician, and everything looked good on paper. The man did not reach me is all...

Jeez, I thought I was the only Torme detractor. He was a great musician, and everything looked good on paper. The man did not reach me is all...

Maybe he'll reach you the third time.

[Valeria Victrix]

A capsule review by Dave Kehr of "Stardust Memories" that touches upon some of the many reasons I dislike Allen and most of his stuff:

"A drab, crowded, ugly film by Woody Allen. Meant to be a confessional in the style of 8 1/2, this 1980 feature is more or less a steady stream of bile: Allen plays a famous film director who hates his movies, hates his audiences, and hates himself. During a seminar at a Jersey shore resort, his life passes before his eyes; the scenes center on his bumbling relationships with what has become the standard Allen complement of three women: the dark (Charlotte Rampling), the fair (Marie-Christine Barrault), and the lesbian (Jessica Harper). Allen is working his camera more, though his visual coups mainly consist of more self-conscious ways of creating the claustrophobia that has always ruled his work. With its blunt, artless angst, the picture leaves you feeling depleted, squashed."

I particularly dislike "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and except for a few set pieces don't care much for the early movies (among Allen's chief flaws as a directer IMO is that he not only often sacrifices dramatic versimilitude for the momentary gag but that the gags also are typically verbal, and airlessly, "smartly" verbal at that). The only Allen film that got to me some was "Annie Hall," and that I think may have been because Dianne Keaton herself momentarily got to Allen -- penetrated his at once smug and fearful isolation -- though I suppose that's more or less the subject of the movie: how does a dick like Woody Allen react when that happens to him. That recent "Paris" movie made me want to thrown things at the screen.

So this guy (and you) don't like Woody Allen - all right we get it! Christ, but that's the most subjective, mean spirited review I've seen in a long time. TPROC is a charming wonderful film, with a dark heart - it swoops and glides, full of unexpected riffs (I particularly like the champagne when she's 'in the film').

As for the line about the gags in the early movies being typically verbal - that is total nonsense. Take The Money And Run, Bananas and Sleeper are crammed to bursting with some of the funniest sight gags ever - IMO of course. Playing cello in the marching band, using the glass cutter to steal from the jewellery shop window. Whoever wrote that review had it in for Woody, and resorted to outright untruth to boot.

I have zero respect for someone who misrepresents the case like that.

[Pete C]

Jews up the wazoo.

[Larry Kart]

A capsule review by Dave Kehr of "Stardust Memories" that touches upon some of the many reasons I dislike Allen and most of his stuff:

"A drab, crowded, ugly film by Woody Allen. Meant to be a confessional in the style of 8 1/2, this 1980 feature is more or less a steady stream of bile: Allen plays a famous film director who hates his movies, hates his audiences, and hates himself. During a seminar at a Jersey shore resort, his life passes before his eyes; the scenes center on his bumbling relationships with what has become the standard Allen complement of three women: the dark (Charlotte Rampling), the fair (Marie-Christine Barrault), and the lesbian (Jessica Harper). Allen is working his camera more, though his visual coups mainly consist of more self-conscious ways of creating the claustrophobia that has always ruled his work. With its blunt, artless angst, the picture leaves you feeling depleted, squashed."

I particularly dislike "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and except for a few set pieces don't care much for the early movies (among Allen's chief flaws as a directer IMO is that he not only often sacrifices dramatic versimilitude for the momentary gag but that the gags also are typically verbal, and airlessly, "smartly" verbal at that). The only Allen film that got to me some was "Annie Hall," and that I think may have been because Dianne Keaton herself momentarily got to Allen -- penetrated his at once smug and fearful isolation -- though I suppose that's more or less the subject of the movie: how does a dick like Woody Allen react when that happens to him. That recent "Paris" movie made me want to thrown things at the screen.

So this guy (and you) don't like Woody Allen - all right we get it! Christ, but that's the most subjective, mean spirited review I've seen in a long time. TPROC is a charming wonderful film, with a dark heart - it swoops and glides, full of unexpected riffs (I particularly like the champagne when she's 'in the film').

As for the line about the gags in the early movies being typically verbal - that is total nonsense. Take The Money And Run, Bananas and Sleeper are crammed to bursting with some of the funniest sight gags ever - IMO of course. Playing cello in the marching band, using the glass cutter to steal from the jewellery shop window. Whoever wrote that review had it in for Woody, and resorted to outright untruth to boot.

I have zero respect for someone who misrepresents the case like that.

Dave Kehr is no pile of chopped liver:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kehr

For your dining and dancing pleasure, Kehr on "Purple Rose":

"Woody Allen's naive notions of art—he thinks it means a story with a moral—might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly. And the sophomoric illusion-versus-reality games he plays in this 1985 film might be easier to take if he had the directorial skills necessary to establish a meaningful demarcation between the two worlds: as it stands, his “reality” is just as flimsily conceived, and populated by characters every bit as flat and arbitrary, as the romantic illusion the film is meant to criticize. The film's small-town Depression-era setting is picturesquely bleak (under Gordon Willis's brackish cinematography, it makes the London of Michael Radford's Nineteen Eighty-four look like Club Med) and peppered with poetically wistful Fellini-isms (run-down whores, an abandoned amusement park). And as the put-upon housewife who finds escape and fulfillment at the local Bijou, Mia Farrow is the embodiment of every obnoxious Hollywood cliche of the “little person”—fragile, waiflike, terminally pathetic. When an actor (Jeff Daniels) steps down from the screen and sweeps her off to a land of perfect romance, we're supposed to feel the wonder of fantasy transforming a tragic reality, but it's really just one sentimental convention running off with another."

Also, the line about the gags in the early films being typically verbal is mine, not Kehr's. "I know how to use a gub" -- right.

Finally, in case anyone complains about violating forum rules, the two capsule reviews of Kehr's I quoted are not IMO copyrighted material. Dave wrote them for the Chicago Reader, on whose website they can be found, but the Reader essentially stole the rights to them from Dave in an ugly manner, and thus I feel free to liberate them. If the powers that be feel otherwise, I will reduce the quoted passages to links.

[fasstrack]

Lots of folks flocking to see, internalize, and quote from David Kehr's films over a nigh 50-year period, are there?

[Larry Kart]

Lots of folks flocking to see, internalize, and quote from David Kehr's films over a nigh 50-year period, are there?

So you mean that Kehr writes about films but doesn't make them? Brilliant point. But among those who write about films -- worthless endeavor though that may be -- Dave is highly regarded.

[Valeria Victrix]

A capsule review by Dave Kehr of "Stardust Memories" that touches upon some of the many reasons I dislike Allen and most of his stuff:

"A drab, crowded, ugly film by Woody Allen. Meant to be a confessional in the style of 8 1/2, this 1980 feature is more or less a steady stream of bile: Allen plays a famous film director who hates his movies, hates his audiences, and hates himself. During a seminar at a Jersey shore resort, his life passes before his eyes; the scenes center on his bumbling relationships with what has become the standard Allen complement of three women: the dark (Charlotte Rampling), the fair (Marie-Christine Barrault), and the lesbian (Jessica Harper). Allen is working his camera more, though his visual coups mainly consist of more self-conscious ways of creating the claustrophobia that has always ruled his work. With its blunt, artless angst, the picture leaves you feeling depleted, squashed."

I particularly dislike "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and except for a few set pieces don't care much for the early movies (among Allen's chief flaws as a directer IMO is that he not only often sacrifices dramatic versimilitude for the momentary gag but that the gags also are typically verbal, and airlessly, "smartly" verbal at that). The only Allen film that got to me some was "Annie Hall," and that I think may have been because Dianne Keaton herself momentarily got to Allen -- penetrated his at once smug and fearful isolation -- though I suppose that's more or less the subject of the movie: how does a dick like Woody Allen react when that happens to him. That recent "Paris" movie made me want to thrown things at the screen.

So this guy (and you) don't like Woody Allen - all right we get it! Christ, but that's the most subjective, mean spirited review I've seen in a long time. TPROC is a charming wonderful film, with a dark heart - it swoops and glides, full of unexpected riffs (I particularly like the champagne when she's 'in the film').

As for the line about the gags in the early movies being typically verbal - that is total nonsense. Take The Money And Run, Bananas and Sleeper are crammed to bursting with some of the funniest sight gags ever - IMO of course. Playing cello in the marching band, using the glass cutter to steal from the jewellery shop window. Whoever wrote that review had it in for Woody, and resorted to outright untruth to boot.

I have zero respect for someone who misrepresents the case like that.

Dave Kehr is no pile of chopped liver:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kehr

For your dining and dancing pleasure, Kehr on "Purple Rose":

"Woody Allen's naive notions of art—he thinks it means a story with a moral—might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly. And the sophomoric illusion-versus-reality games he plays in this 1985 film might be easier to take if he had the directorial skills necessary to establish a meaningful demarcation between the two worlds: as it stands, his “reality” is just as flimsily conceived, and populated by characters every bit as flat and arbitrary, as the romantic illusion the film is meant to criticize. The film's small-town Depression-era setting is picturesquely bleak (under Gordon Willis's brackish cinematography, it makes the London of Michael Radford's Nineteen Eighty-four look like Club Med) and peppered with poetically wistful Fellini-isms (run-down whores, an abandoned amusement park). And as the put-upon housewife who finds escape and fulfillment at the local Bijou, Mia Farrow is the embodiment of every obnoxious Hollywood cliche of the “little person”—fragile, waiflike, terminally pathetic. When an actor (Jeff Daniels) steps down from the screen and sweeps her off to a land of perfect romance, we're supposed to feel the wonder of fantasy transforming a tragic reality, but it's really just one sentimental convention running off with another."

Also, the line about the gags in the early films being typically verbal is mine, not Kehr's. "I know how to use a gub" -- right.

Finally, in case anyone complains about violating forum rules, the two capsule reviews of Kehr's I quoted are not IMO copyrighted material. Dave wrote them for the Chicago Reader, on whose website they can be found, but the Reader essentially stole the rights to them from Dave in an ugly manner, and thus I feel free to liberate them. If the powers that be feel otherwise, I will reduce the quoted passages to links.

As regards the review - the point about Mia's character getting swept off her feet is the fact that she's being taken for a ride - the actor himself is a douche, but the character he plays is a wonderfully nice guy. She choses the asshole rather than run off to a fairytale world - and she gets gypped. I happen to thing that's a great twist.

The rest of his spiel is just nasty minded - did Kehr stop to think that Allen deliberately made the illusion and reality almost interchangeable given that the central dynamic was the central relationship between Mia's character, the character in the film, and the real life actor who played the role - and how it turned out? I think Kehr suffers from a) an unforgiveable lapse into subjectivity, which is one of the reasons I trust so few critics out there, and b) a major beef against Allen. Like I said earlier - he doesn't like him. So what? You shouldn't expect to like everything in this world. Obviously it's something deeper than that in this case - Kehr has an axe to grind and - if I actually gave a toss about the mean spirited little git - I'd be interested in finding out what it is.

When it comes to the thing about verbal vs. visual gags - you haven't really explained your position. I pointed out a couple of the many wonderful visual gags in Woody's early films - to be frank your opinion on this one doesn't wash at all. Watch 'Everything You All Wasn't To Know About Sex...' and tell me there isn't a shed load of brilliant visual humour there.

Edited August 14, 2012 by Valeria Victrix

[fasstrack]

Not worthless, Larry. But do let us have a bit of perspective re the importance of the parsed vs. the parser. In this case I believe the vox populi to be correct. You know, that pesky old saw about the 'test of time'.

[robertoart]

Woody Allen has had a pretty charmed life with critics (film-wise if not personally), so it's good to read some extreme dissent.

Then again, I tend to approach his work looking for gut busting laughs. Scenes like the cellist and the gub note provide that.

[JSngry]

You know, that pesky old saw about the 'test of time'.

For the sake of argument, though, let us consider that "time" in that sense will eventually involve more than 50 years and the approval of the generations(s) that experienced the body of work in more or less real time. Redwoods, now that's something that stands the test of time. Cockroaches too. For everything else, there's evolution and/or extinction.

I mean, I like the guy's well enough for what it is, he does what he does, and he does it with his own thing in full effect. You're never not going to get a Woody Allen Film out of a Woody Allen film, right? But I don't know how well it will translate to all of pan-galactic lifeformage in, say, 300 (or even 3000, never mind 3,000,000) years from now, or if it will even be possible for that to be a consideration. I know that nobody here will be around to see it, at least not in their current form.

In the meantime, I wanna see that Jerry Lewis movie with the gigantic milk pitcher. I've been cracking up all day just thinking about it. Which one is that?

[fasstrack]

'That's a PLAIN b'...

[fasstrack]

Jim, it's a slam dunk people will be watching Annie Hall generations from now. The simple reason being that it has reaches out and connects on the most basic levels. Anyone can understand it and all but the most shrivelled prune can feel it.

[Valeria Victrix]

Jim, it's a slam dunk people will be watching Annie Hall generations from now. The simple reason being that it has reaches out and connects on the most basic levels. Anyone can understand it and all but the most shrivelled prune can feel it.

I hear you on that one! And - as long as people have marching bands - generations from now people will still be laughing their arses off at the sight of a man with a cello playing in the middle of the street, looking over his shoulder at his advancing bandmates, picking up his chair and his cello, scampering on a few feet, and settling down to play a few more bars.

[Larry Kart]

Valeria -- About verbal versus visual gags in Allen's early films, let me step back from that particular issue for the moment (because I don't have the time or the impetus to pore over those films right now) and instead choose an example from a later film "Zelig" that exemplifies what my main point was there: Allen's frequent willingness to sacrifice dramatic versimilitude/plausibility for the momentary gag.

Now "Zelig" IMO, as a mockumentary, would seem to need to maintain a strong semblance of dramatic versimilitude/plausibility throughout in order to maintain its central comic conceit -- that there is/was a man named Leonard Zelig, a "human chameleon" whose overwhelming desire for conformity gave him the ability to take on the facial and vocal characteristics of whomever he happened to be around at the moment and who thus was able to sidle his way into many key scenes in 20th Century history. Signs that an atmosphere of surface plausibility was felt by Allen to be crucial to this conceit are the constants use of "newsreel" footage, the deadpan performances of Mia Farrow as Zelig's psychiatrist, and the frequent and again deadpan in both words and demeanor cameos in which such figures as Bruno Bettelheim, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, and Bricktop reminisce about Zelig and speculate about the meaning of his career.

All well and good, and then Allen pisses it away for one cheap gag. Zelig has been confined to a mental hospital where one important doctor thinks that his problem is not psychiatric, as Farrow's character thinks it is, but chiropractic. So we see "newsreel" footage of Allen as Zelig lying face up on a gurney and being drastically manipulated by the chiropractor so that his prone legs with feet pointing toward the ceiling are eventually turned into prone legs with feet pointed toward the floor. In a Three Stooges feature or a Tom and Jerry cartoon, sure, but not in a movie that's set up the way "Zelig" is. And then, the reversed feet gone, we're back to the deadpan stuff, over and out. It's as if Miles Davis in his "Kind of Blue" solo had inserted a quote from "Mairzy Doats."

Fasstrack -- Just to be clear, I said that I responded positively to "Annie Hall."

[Valeria Victrix]

You know, that pesky old saw about the 'test of time'.

For the sake of argument, though, let us consider that "time" in that sense will eventually involve more than 50 years and the approval of the generations(s) that experienced the body of work in more or less real time. Redwoods, now that's something that stands the test of time. Cockroaches too. For everything else, there's evolution and/or extinction.

I mean, I like the guy's well enough for what it is, he does what he does, and he does it with his own thing in full effect. You're never not going to get a Woody Allen Film out of a Woody Allen film, right? But I don't know how well it will translate to all of pan-galactic lifeformage in, say, 300 (or even 3000, never mind 3,000,000) years from now, or if it will even be possible for that to be a consideration. I know that nobody here will be around to see it, at least not in their current form.

Hey, tough crowd! Pretty much screws over all contemporary art doesn't it?

Also, on a related note - think about the medium! Floppy disks were what 20/30 years ago, now where you going to find a computer to extract the information that's on it. We can hope that in 300 years we'll still be using USB technology but I wouldn't really be too sure.

Thing is - the Rosetta Stone was a stone with marks on it. Universally accessible, unless you're blind. Unfortunately technology is constantly superseding itself. Picture a ruin of the future - enthralled archaeologists rummaging through the ruins of an old suburb. Triumph! They've found an ancient data carrier. But - dammit all to hell! - they can't access the damn thing cos society stopped using USB like 700 years previously...

[JSngry]

Jim, it's a slam dunk people will be watching Annie Hall generations from now. The simple reason being that it has reaches out and connects on the most basic levels. Anyone can understand it and all but the most shrivelled prune can feel it.

How far out into the future are you willing to guarantee that

A) The technology will still be there

B) The "common humanity" of what we've known it to be in our lifetime will still be there

C) The various geographical & cultural points of reference will be commonly and easily understood

D) Humankind will not have evolved (or devolved) to the point where more or less everything that we know and love now will not seem hopelessly simple-minded?

I mean, "reaching out and connecting on the most basic levels", that's something that I'd imagine has been going on since before recorded time. But hell, you can't get more than a relative handful of specialists to dig Bach these days, ya' know?

If, as I suspect has been happening for quite a while now, the trek of "the focal point of human civilization" makes its way back towards its origins (which are certainly not here in "the west"), what use will they have of us? And to what extent will they go to show how little use they really do have? "Eras" are easy enough, it's the transitions from one to the other that gets....messy.

It's a long way from here to there. A long way. Ain't everything gonna make it. Don't everything need to. And ain't nothing has to.

Been to the library lately? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

Pretty much screws over all contemporary art doesn't it?

Only if we want to use it as something on which to hang our own perceived/desired immortality...

[robertoart]

Valeria -- About verbal versus visual gags in Allen's early films, let me step back from that particular issue for the moment (because I don't have the time or the impetus to pore over those films right now) and instead choose an example from a later film "Zelig" that exemplifies what my main point was there: Allen's frequent willingness to sacrifice dramatic versimilitude/plausibility for the momentary gag.

Now "Zelig" IMO, as a mockumentary, would seem to need to maintain a strong semblance of dramatic versimilitude/plausibility throughout in order to maintain its central comic conceit -- that there is/was a man named Leonard Zelig, a "human chameleon" whose overwhelming desire for conformity gave him the ability to take on the facial and vocal characteristics of whomever he happened to be around at the moment and who thus was able to sidle his way into many key scenes in 20th Century history. Signs that an atmosphere of surface plausibility was felt by Allen to be crucial to this conceit are the constants use of "newsreel" footage, the deadpan performances of Mia Farrow as Zelig's psychiatrist, and the frequent and again deadpan in both words and demeanor cameos in which such figures as Bruno Bettelheim, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, and Bricktop reminisce about Zelig and speculate about the meaning of his career.

All well and good, and then Allen pisses it away for one cheap gag. Zelig has been confined to a mental hospital where one important doctor thinks that his problem is not psychiatric, as Farrow's character thinks it is, but chiropractic. So we see "newsreel" footage of Allen as Zelig lying face up on a gurney and being drastically manipulated by the chiropractor so that his prone legs with feet pointing toward the ceiling are eventually turned into prone legs with feet pointed toward the floor. In a Three Stooges feature or a Tom and Jerry cartoon, sure, but not in a movie that's set up the way "Zelig" is. And then, the reversed feet gone, we're back to the deadpan stuff, over and out. It's as if Miles Davis in his "Kind of Blue" solo had inserted a quote from "Mairzy Doats."

Fasstrack -- Just to be clear, I said that I responded positively to "Annie Hall."

Actually Annie Hall and Manhattan are probably the ones I don't want to see again. A bunch of self satisfied - self obsessed 'ponderers'- with nothing to interfere with their existential indulgences - letting nothing stand in the way of their search for fulfilment. Which one is the one where he finally decides on getting his end off with 'the girl on the cusp of womanhood' - Annie Hall or Manhattan? The mise en scene is worth it though.

[Larry Kart]

But hell, you can't get more than a relative handful of specialists to dig Bach these days, ya' know?

Really? I don't think so.

That is, I think it's more than "a relative handful of specialists."

[Valeria Victrix]

Valeria -- About verbal versus visual gags in Allen's early films, let me step back from that particular issue for the moment (because I don't have the time or the impetus to pore over those films right now) and instead choose an example from a later film "Zelig" that exemplifies what my main point was there: Allen's frequent willingness to sacrifice dramatic versimilitude/plausibility for the momentary gag.

Now "Zelig" IMO, as a mockumentary, would seem to need to maintain a strong semblance of dramatic versimilitude/plausibility throughout in order to maintain its central comic conceit -- that there is/was a man named Leonard Zelig, a "human chameleon" whose overwhelming desire for conformity gave him the ability to take on the facial and vocal characteristics of whomever he happened to be around at the moment and who thus was able to sidle his way into many key scenes in 20th Century history. Signs that an atmosphere of surface plausibility was felt by Allen to be crucial to this conceit are the constants use of "newsreel" footage, the deadpan performances of Mia Farrow as Zelig's psychiatrist, and the frequent and again deadpan in both words and demeanor cameos in which such figures as Bruno Bettelheim, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, and Bricktop reminisce about Zelig and speculate about the meaning of his career.

All well and good, and then Allen pisses it away for one cheap gag. Zelig has been confined to a mental hospital where one important doctor thinks that his problem is not psychiatric, as Farrow's character thinks it is, but chiropractic. So we see "newsreel" footage of Allen as Zelig lying face up on a gurney and being drastically manipulated by the chiropractor so that his prone legs with feet pointing toward the ceiling are eventually turned into prone legs with feet pointed toward the floor. In a Three Stooges feature or a Tom and Jerry cartoon, sure, but not in a movie that's set up the way "Zelig" is. And then, the reversed feet gone, we're back to the deadpan stuff, over and out. It's as if Miles Davis in his "Kind of Blue" solo had inserted a quote from "Mairzy Doats."

Fasstrack -- Just to be clear, I said that I responded positively to "Annie Hall."

Sorry Larry, but you cannot make a statement about his early films, viz. the gags were all verbal, and then back down as you did. That's poppycock man!

Then to argue that somehow one particular riff in a later film somehow supports your case is absurd. Particularly as it is in fact a very plausible scene - you surely know about the monstrosities perpetrated in the name of medicine in the U.S. over the period ranging - arbitrarily - from the late 1800's through the mid 1960's (Rose Kennedy anyone?). From that perspective, the grotesque manipulations of 'Zelig' are not unusual at all. You are betraying a certain degree of critical myopia I deem.

Edited August 15, 2012 by Valeria Victrix

[JSngry]

But hell, you can't get more than a relative handful of specialists to dig Bach these days, ya' know?

Really? I don't think so.

That is, I think it's more than "a relative handful of specialists."

Relative to the overall global population? Sure about that?