Woody @ the Reeler.

You knew the Reeler, angling to become the traffic light at the intersection of New York and Film, wouldn't let Film Forum's Essentially Woody retrospective slip by without comment, but heavens. Karen Kramer and ST VanAirsdale have collected appreciations from a delightfully wide-ranging array of New Yorkers - a former mayor, a celebrity composer, a few programmers and way more than a few filmmakers.

As "a Jewish (well, truth be told, half-Jewish) kid growing up on Manhattan's Upper East Side," Andrew Grant wanted to be Woody Allen when he grew up - until he actually grew up and realized that, among other things, "Woody's New York, while stemming from genuine adoration, is little more than a romanticized notion of the city, gazed upon from a vantage point reserved for only a select few.... Woody in his 70s will never be the filmmaker he was in the 70s, but even this late in the game, a film like Scoop can still yield a few surprises. His films may not have the operatic grandeur of Scorsese, the epic scope of Coppola or even the social relevance of Lumet, but they are unrivaled in their ability to create a singular angle on the human condition that is distinctly his own."

Updated through 12/24.

Matt Singer and Vadim Rizov consider Woody Allen's work as an actor, while Michelle Orange discovers, to her great pleasure, The Complete Prose of Woody Allen.

Update, 12/21: At PopMatters, Michael Beuning offers a "Guide to the Lesser Woody Allen Films."

Update, 12/24: Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling: "Woody Allen is actually one of the most essential American artists of the past century, subsuming and reappropriating the textures of the modern European arts for the American cosmopolitan sensibility, funneling those tropes into a New York tenor, and thus single-handedly creating a new form of Jewish humor, which tightened the Borscht belt around the ever-inflating girth of the gentile elitism he (and we) both despises and covets. Each Woody Allen film is tricky to navigate; while he seems to put himself out there, in firing range, bearing his neuroses for all to heckle, he also always is shielding himself from some greater truth, whether by hiding behind Upper West Side extravagance or Euro art-house nostalgia."

Posted by dwhudson at December 20, 2006 1:16 AM