O Woody....

Herald Sun: Grey skies suit gloomy Allen [14may05]: "Allen said London, where he will make another film this year, also suited his legendary gloomy demeanour. 'The weather in London is cool and the skies were grey every day - perfect for me. So I couldn't wait to get back there again,' he said."


Woody--true genius, relentless neurotic, and probably terrible medicine for me. Nonetheless, I can't get enough of him. I'm 12 films in to an every increasing canon that currently tops out in the high thirties. Darkly comic, tragically dramtic, always poetic, and eerily close to real life in all to many circumstances. No man knows how to shoot an urban landscape better (or make me fall in love with cities I don't favour)--Manhatan's black and white shots of the city, set to soaring, energetic Gershwin music was so brilliantly conceived it is eternal and timeless, a real living throbbing portrait of New York (and it's upperclass life--Woody strays away from the South Bronx, albeit less so than modern pictures of the city found in certain popular television shows). Moving past his essential urban quality, Woody knows perfectly how to capture the full catalogue of human emotion and experience, capturing us in all our beautiful ugliness and imperfect glory. His characters are real flesh and bone, and they find genuine love, heartbreak, despair, hate, joy, success, and failure. Complexity? Nah--just real life.

...and wow does he have a way with intellectual one liners!