What an original film!

You think there arent many posts on this film? Check out Mighty Aphrodite. Quality films directed by a real life genius. Nobody wants to discuss Woody Allen anymore?

You have a huge Allen fan right here. I don't really think Woody's biggest fan base chats on the internet too often.

HELLO!!

We are here in Europe. I did my Honours Degree dissertation on Woody Allen because I admire his work so much. His portrait of Manhattan is the dream romance I lived out on my honeymoon when I went to New York. What impresses me so much is that his comic view of American life is so weighted with moral sadness and remorse for things done and undone. This man really changed the image and philosophy of film comedy and that is the greatest gift he could leave in American film. I am not in the least surprised he is not very well liked across the States. His vision is far more polemical than most folks can handle living in the Midwest. It my seems like he is not referring to them because his films are set in New York but that is the McGuffin as Hitchcock would say.

His films are very specifically about the American condition because New York is the birthplace of European culture and Western ideology in America: no I'm forgetting Boston as the religious haven from European religiously bigotry.

Woody Allen is great because he tries to make sense of gender inequities in modern culture BUT his discourse is masked by the gags/jokes but if we believe Fraud, there is no such thing as a joke, only concealed anger covered by wit. I will always love his films and those STUPID critics who want this high contrast Hollywood comedy of crass jokes and marriage at the end can eat $hit and die.

"Well why don't you answer me, you damn yellow livered trash" William Holden in The Wild Bunch

hey, you get to see dreyfuss get reemed :)

one of the funniest part is when the old man is banging drefus up the butt, and he is trying to cum, but he can't, and drefus is like hurry up already. Then he finnaly gets the load off and drefus is like finally and the old man look like he was about to have a heart attack.

8 1/2 was more comparable to Stardust Memories, and Deconstructing Haryy is loosely based on Wild Strawberries. Isaac in Wild Strawberries actually goes through childhood and adolescent years.

I would say that Allen was most certainly past being directly influenced by any director when he made this film, the age he was. His lifelong obsession with Bergman and Scandinavian doom (that he juxtaposes to his bathetical Jewish morbidity) is well known and past the point of emulation, being so absorbed into his more dramatic work from mid eighties (not counting earlier obvious attempts at replicas). As for Fellini - I really don't see it, Allen's sensibility is so removed from it, and he certainly doesn't need external inspiration on the subject of self-reflexivity.

The Toby Maguire episode is from Without Feathers, which was published in 1975 - perhaps a version of a story or a play from it, it's been ages since I've read it. And there are plenty of other motifs from his earlier work that he reassembles in this film.