THE JO-TEL … illegal blog downfield

I can do a serviceable Woody Allen impression.  The best I've seen (by far) though is Dana Carvey.  (Bonus points if anyone can find the SNL clip on youtube or somewhere. I cannot.)  But that's an impression of Woody Allen. Here are what I think are the top five performances in a Woody Allen movie. 

10. Sydney Pollack - Husbands and Wives

I get the impression that acting in a Woody Allen movie is a difficult thing to do.  Generally, I think Allen films at a brisk pace to cultivate an impromptu delivery.  However, this sometimes has the effect of making his actor's deliveries sound stagy.  More specifically, if you're not Woody Allen and you're playing the paranoid protagonist, it is damn near impossible to not come off as Woody in the form of another actor.  Great actors like Kenneth Branagh (in Celebrity) and John Cusack (in Bullets over Broadway) have both succumb to this.

Sydney Pollack in the frayed Husbands and Wives does not.  A director himself (of such films as Tootsie and The Way We Were), Pollack does not act the character, but instead simply delivers the lines as himself, a general trait of his acting.  (See also Eyes Wide Shut.)  As such, he comes off as the most realistically emotional New York upper-class-intellectual trainwreck this side of Allen himself. 

9. Tracey Ulmann - Bullets over Broadway

In a movie full of colorful performances, including Diane Wiest's Academy-Award-winning turn as the Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.-esque Helen Sinclair, no one stops a scene as vibrantly as Tracey Ulmann (uh?), playing the cloying, dog-obsessed Eden Brent, when she arrives at the first rehearsal.  For about five minutes the screen is a-flame with a perfect portrayal of an annoying eccentric. 

8. Gene Wilder - Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask 

Everything is hit and miss.  The skit about the cross-dressing middle class suburbanite is unbearably bad.  But the Gene Wilder skit about the sheep is absolutely oh-my-jeebus classic.  Basically, a farmer brings a sheep in with him to a general internist played by Gene Hacker, informing the doctor that he harbors an unhealthy attraction to the sheep.  The doctor's incredulity slowly wanes and, falling in love with the sheep, the doctor goes on the offensive for the sheep's affections. The scene where Wilder is sitting at the dinner table with the sheep, in the midst of a domestic dispute, has been permanently lodged in that part of my brain that determines laughing. 

7. Woody Allen - Hannah and Her Sisters

Woody Allen never played Woody Allen better than in Hannah and her Sisters, his first committed foray into existential black comedy.  He was born to play a hypochondriac who thinks he has cancer ("GAIL: Two months ago, you thought you had a malignant melanoma.  MICKEY: Naturally, –the sudden appearance of a black spot on my back! GAIL: It was on your shirt!"); and the scene where he dismisses all modern philosophy while in the throes of depression encapsulates the pith of Allen's intellectual stand-up: "And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we're gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again."  Woody!  Don't be swayed by Walter Kaufmann's outmoded conclusions, which are overly mired in a few lines from Nietzsche's unpublished diaries!  There is nothing in Nietzsche's official writings that indicate that he thought of the theory of eternal recurrence as anything more than a literary symbol, intended to supplant religion as the bringer of meaning to life's actions in order to destroy the idea of nihilistic immoralism!  

6. Alan Alda - Crimes and Misdemeanors

Some actors are so good that they are ignored.  Alan Alda is one of those.  He often gets his character so well that you don't appreciate the achievement.  To be able to play, for instance, the magnetic prankster in M*A*S*H as well as the puffed-up superficial comedian in Crimes and Misdemeanors speaks to his breadth.  But really, he just makes what may have been merely an annoying character into an annoying and funny character, like Hip E.  The foil to Allen's Erol Morris-esque serious documentarian, Alda plays the successful TV comedian that Allen ceaselessly parodied in the 70s.  "If it bends, it's funny. If it break, it's not funny," Alda explains to the audience of his egocentric biopic, perfectly conveying the frustrating vagueries that famous or powerful people can often get away with spewing, their nebulous platitudes gaining meaning in the minds of those that imbue them with the influence of their artistic accomplishments. 

5. Mia Farrow - The Purple Rose of Cairo

I only recently found out the Mia Farrow was married to Frank Sinatra during the filming of Rosemary's Baby.  Which is fascinating because during Allen's Farrow period from the late 70s through the early 80s, her on-screen persona is reinvented away from starlet and toward the intelligent, vulnerable, mousy urbanite.  And boy was she ever bold to allow anyone to give her that terribly frayed perm that she wore for about eight years.  Seriously, ladies: what was the deal with the perm????

4. Diane Keaton - Manhattan

Shut up.  Just shut up.  I know: "Shark, don't try to seem well-versed by forgetting your first loves."  Look, dude, I know what you're saying.  That's why if you could look into the future, circa 2008, you would see that my third favorite album of all time is STILL Dark Side of the Moon.  Let's keep things temporally relevant though. What I'm really saying is that Diane Keaton is actually better, more subtly better, dude, in Manhattan than in Annie Hall.  Just watch the scene below, you'll see.  Provided you speak Spanish. 

3. Diane Weist - Hannah and Her Sisters

Diane Wiest is one of the most overlooked actresses in movies.  She's more than just the nervous and well-meaning mom in Parenthood and The Lost Boys.  In the excellent Hannah and Her Sisters, for instance, she convincingly plays a neurotic addictive trapped in the generosity of her better-adapted sisters.  Of course, she gets pregnant in the end though, echoing the nauseatingly disturbing ending of Parenthood, where everyone's problems with their kids is somehow solved by … everyone having another kid.  Ugh.

2. Woody Allen - Sleeper 

Blurb #1

A rediscovery of Woody Allen's early slapstick comedy is needed.  It's bad enough that many people today only know him for his second-rate existential half-chucklers like Match Point.  In this regard he has been trying unsuccessfully for years to match Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Viewers with a nose for the classics always locate Annie Hall and Manhattan and are, in turn, regaled with two of the best movies of the 70s.  But the movies that launched Allen have gone the way of the work of other historical comedians (see Keaton and Fields), namely: into popular obscurity.  I'll never understand why people forget old comedians, but will always revisit dramatic works?  If anything the former stand the test of time better.  F.W. Murnau's dramatic love story Sunrise (1931) has never grabbed me, but that last scene in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1935) is some of the most amusing stuff I've ever watched. Perhaps emotions are tied more to the feeling of the times, while comedy is intended to transcend that feeling, and therefore it produces a greater effect on later audiences?  Regardless, Allen's old physical comedy, which was never better than it was in Sleeper, should not be missed. 

Blurb #2 

There is scene in this where Woody Allen tries to fly.

1. Sean Penn - Sweet and Lowdown 

How did Sean Penn manage to craft Allen's character vessel for his own fetishization of submissive women into the one of the best performances of the last ten years?  Telling the "real" story of Penn's fakely historical jazz guitar legend Emit Ray, Sweet and Lowdown is Allen's best movie since the 80s, in no large part because of Penn, who harnesses Allen's neurotic energy into an entirely different character, one that tries not to show his insecurity, but puffs himself up to himself and others.  But the trying is the key.  In the pained moments were Penn cringes through his own insecure puffery, you can see an actor good enough to define a character by subtle mannerisms. 

-Shark