Valeria Victrix

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That specific point wasn't about potential audiences for Allen's audiences as you can see from the foregoing. However, given the specific socio-cultural setting of most of his films, they're definitely geared for enjoyment by the elite of the first world.

Arleta Gunther Mats Soderlund Matt Damon

You may - or may not! I don't know exactly, cos I can't see your paws right now - have a gub. You definitely have a certain amount of equivocation. My point throughout has been that Kehr - and through his words, as your proxy - you yourself, have been indulging in a bash at Allen's work. When I saw that many points did not hold up - e.g. many of Kehr's points are merest subjectivity. I've made my retort re The Purple Rose Of Cairo - an alternative reading which is rather closer to Allen's intention I think. Wrt the 'verbal' vs. 'visual' issue. When you say 'typically verbal' with reference to his early films you are saying that these films are typified by verbal humour. I denied - and still deny, wholeheartedly - that smearing, coats one and all with a tarry brush generalisation. Without getting into an absurd reductionist debate about what percentage of the gags in these films come from visual as opposed to verbal gags, I put it to you that a significant amount of the humour is visual. Also, you seem to take issue with the 'smart' nature of some of those verbal gags. I have to pause and wonder - wtf, a little. I take it you mean 'smart' as in fast and snappy. Are you channeling Cool Hand Luke's jailer, or some archetypal 19th century schoolmarm when you say that? You realise that you're actually complimenting him on sharp material, whose impact - like that of most comedians - relies on its timing. You've been consistently confirming that you simply don't like or enjoy Woody Allen's work. We all have the right to not enjoy somebody's work - whether a specific piece, or their entire oeuvre - but you seem to be taking it more personally than that. You're trying to prove the Woody Allen's work is objectively bad. And I would wonder why, except for the fact that I myself have many artists, authors, musicians etc. whose work I would dread to be shut up in a room with - but you know what? I take one day at a time. One damn day at a time, and just hope like hell that I don't get involved with the wrong girl at the wrong time, or my Sundays won't be worth living.

I think a lot more than you think. I've been to both countries several times in the '90s, and could see it happening then, so I can only imagine what it's like now. You underestimate American cultural hegemony. I imagine so, but they would have been the urbanized elites - a fifth of the population at best. You know that in China the urbanites and the countrydwellers are officially different class citizens? As for the wider question re just how marginal an appreciation of Bach is. If we're taking the so called First World as our remit, I would say - still far more than you think. The point is that everything is relative - apart from pop culture of course - the fractured demographic, sliced into multifaceted shards, each partakes multifariously from the splendidly spread feast of the senses which is given to us few only now, for this all too brief time in history. Dine well...

Absolutely of course - but you're entirely missing the point. Whether willfuly or not I'm unwilling to guess on such short acquaintance.

No doubt you do, but then I couldn't start with Jerry Blavat Jesse Belvin Harold Melvin Well then! Looks like this is another case of the ends justifying the means I guess... Herman Melville Herman Hesse John Kay

I think I've got right of way here freelancer. The Brain Steven Spielberg Steven Gerrard

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? Absurd! These days, the vast majority of 'our' interests here in the 'First World' are 'niche' relative to the overall global population. Factor in China + India? How many of their inhabitants have seen Sex and the City do you think, let alone drank a Coke?

The Brain Steven Spielberg Steven Gerrard

Jackie Mittoo Tree Leyburn Ron Nine Ron Howard Howard The Duck Duck Baker

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.

Absolutely agree - excellent stuff. They were definitely a true Kraut rock band, a la Can, Faust, Amon Duul and the rest in their formative years. Motorische Musik - Achtung Baby! I enjoy Ralf and Florian, and the two eponymous albums more than their later stuff in fact. There are some good tunes on the ones after that, picking up steam for that great run through Trans Europe Express, Man Machine and Computer World - the immortal Pocket Calculator will never die - but that nothing after that moves me.

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...

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.

Jayne Meadows Jackie Gleason Bobby Hackett Lizzie Borden Lizzie McGuire Elizabeth I

Wurzel Gummidge Aunt Sally Sally Fields (particularly proud of this one!)

Because in some of your recent posts you adopt (and I can only hope you're horsing around by doing so) a rather flowery-genteel mode of speech -- e.g. "I honestly feel that advocating a thrashing is not beyond the pale ... an expression of extreme umbrage" -- which is the sort of thing that led W.C. Fields to use that phrase. I appreciate your explanation, but I have to say two things in response. Firstly - for all I know you were a contemporary of old Fieldy's and hence his turn of phrase still seems current and appropriate in your mind. Secondly - if this is not in fact the case, how would you expect someone else to be aware of this little piece of minutia? Theoretically I could justify any amount of patronising down talk, nay outright vulgarity, and then turn around and say - "Ah, but you see my dear boy, that terminology was perfectly acceptable in '03/'13/'23. However, I will accept your explanation in the spirit in which it was (I hope) intended. And now - back to Dmitri!

Teri Hatcher Egbert of Wessex Bertie Wooster

I believe there were three box sets released eventually - 2 4-disc sets, and a 6-disc one. That's a whole lot of standards! I enjoy them all immensely though, and I rate Kevin O'Neill very highly as a guitarist. Some of Braxton's horn choices don't quite come off in my book as the intonation is a little off pitch - most noticeable in the heads. YEAH! Makes for a very twisted interpretation of the material, reminds me of Sun Ra or Marshall Allen. I think it's intentionally microtonal. I dunno m'man. Have you ever read the comments on an Indian Classical Music video on Youtube? You'll have somebody arguing that Ravi always played out of key, then someone else saying 'but ICM operates under the sruti (22 notes to the octave) system, so it's not your standard tuning, and the response to that is - No, you don't understand - he's not doing it right.' Much as I love these sets - and I do, listen to them frequently in fact - but he's sloppy on several. E.g. on Blue Turk A La Ronda (20 Standards) he is just totally out of step with Kevin. Having said that I love this stuff. Kevin may repeat some ideas and whatnot, but they're great ideas. Also - @craig - you have to remember these were played live, not in the studio - i.e. not initially intended for release. In a live setting a lot of musicians (even the great ones) will resort to favourite licks. To be honest I think you're being a bit harsh on him.

Bobby Gillespie Bob Hope Hope Davis

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.

Friar Luke Wadding Cool Hand Luke Hot Lips Houlihan

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