"No, seriously, no cables, not even an antenna! Have you seen this? Have you heard of this? I don't know where it came from, but this nice Mexican girl gave it to me. She's pretty, but I think she might be a witch."

Word up, hepcats, peep this excerpt from a recent interview with Woody Allen:

Reuters: You still write your scripts on a typewriter?

Allen: I don’t own a word processor; I am not a gadget person.

Reuters: So how do you adapt to the world of iPods and iPads?

Allen: I have a telephone, a cell phone, but all I can do on it is call out and receive calls. I don’t have any other use, I have no, what do you call it, text number? [source]

A “text number?”  Jesus, man, is that some Jitterbug scheme to get old people to buy two phones?  I also like how he casually refers to “word processors” as if they’re the latest in gadgetry.  I’m old enough to remember jerking off before the internet (in college!) and even I barely know what that is.  I imagine him looking at the reporter’s microphone going “Can it hear me? Do I need to get closer to the machine?”  Which I suppose makes it all the more impressive that his latest movie is actually pretty friggin good. I should show him the email forward with all those “amazing real pictures” my mom keeps sending me.  “Good heavens! I can’t believe the shark ate that helicopter,” I imagine he’d say.

[thanks to the ancient Matt Ufford for the tip]

WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME DRUNK HEMINGWAY WAS IN THIS MOVIE?!

A Night at the Jewseum: Woody Allen Molests His History Book

I walked out of Midnight in Paris with a smile on my face, and frankly, I’m shocked.  The last time I walked out of a Woody Allen film, it was on an airplane.  Not really, but that’s exactly the kind of joke you expect to hear in a Woody Allen movie, a hacky, Borscht belt knee-slapper interspersed amongst the polysyllabic bloviating and romanticized notions of intellectual cocktail chatter. The “turgid discussions about categorical imperativeses,” and whatnot.  More so than just about everything, comedy has a way of passing you by if you don’t evolve. A style tends to die as soon as people recognize its structure, and I thought the Woody Allen rom-com was dead. D-E-A-D, dead like the Farrelly Brothers.  I figured the critics writing glowing reviews were just nostalgia junkies. At best, I expected inoffensive chuckle fare, conversation fodder for my mom and men with ponytails, something to help them relive the glory days while boogeying to moderately-volumed Steely Dan. Instead, I actually laughed. Hell, I thoroughly f*cking enjoyed myself.

It’s not that it’s not Woody, it’s very Woody. At it’s most basic, Midnight in Paris is about a man searching for a woman who can appreciate the beauty of rainfall in Paris. If that was all it was about, I would’ve never stopped vomiting.  Thankfully, there’s a middle section. Owen Wilson plays Gil, one of the Woodiest of Woody Allen surrogates, a chatty screenwriter who wears earth-tone suits and shirts with no tie, and talks philosophically while gesturing with his hands. Visiting Paris with his bitchy fiancee played by Rachel McAdams (OH MY GOD YOU GUYS HER ASS IS A MIRACLE), Gil has dreams of one day ditching screenwriting and moving to Paris to write novels like his golden age idols. The story begins the way you’d expect a Woody Allen movie to begin.  With stagey, contrived dialog about psychology (“you’re living in the past!”) and politics (“Palin is a lunatic!”) that you could never imagine two people having in the real world unless they were pretending to be in a Woody Allen movie.  But quickly it leaps from Woody Allen-land into the realm of fantasy, becoming, like… this whole other thing.  This magnificent tall tale, this light-hearted Charlie Kaufman.

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Writers of fiction strive to create compelling characters who feel real, and managing that almost always requires drawing on your own personality and experiences. Protagonists often end up as thinly-disguised stand ins for the author, and for someone like Woody Allen, who hasn’t gone a full calendar year without putting out a film since 1978 (between Annie Hall and Manhattan) 1981 (between Stardust Memories and A Midsummer’s Night Sex Comedy) it naturally happens quite often.  In celebration of Woody Allen’s latest critical darling and legitimate box office hit, Midnight in Paris, our video editor, Oliver Noble has gone through thousands upon thousands of hours (approximately) of footage from past Woody Allen movies and put together this compilation of quasi-fictional stand ins for Woody Allen, showing what Oliver believes to be the central tenets of the Woody Allen persona, the character traits and idiosyncrasies that most often shine through.  And Oliver has particularly keen insight into Woody Allen’s mind, being that he is also a Jewish man who has sexual thoughts about his daughter. In fact, we frequently engage in turgid discussions about categorical imperatives.

Jesus, does Woody Allen ever sleep?  Trivia: the last full calendar year that passed without the release of at least one Woody Allen-written movie was 1976, between Love and Death and Annie Hall. At least one movie a year for 35 years, and still had time to bang his own stepdaughter.  Now that is impressive.

Anyway, the trailer for his new one, Midnight in Paris just hit, and you’ll never believe this, but it’s about verbose intellectual white people.  From the title I assumed it was another Paris Hilton nightvision sex tape, but nope, just turgid discussions about categorical imperatives.  Opposite Rachel McAdams and Michael Sheen, it stars Owen Wilson as an American in Paris who starts ditching his American wife and friends after midnight to go experience the true Parisian nightlife, which is no doubt far more fulfilling than whatever close-minded American crap he was doing before.  Gosh, I hope this is just like Eat, Pray, Love, where some rich A-hole explains the meaning of life to other rich A-holes.

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And now, from the That’s-Not-What-I-Heard files comes a story from actress Lucy Punch, who reportedly learned the hard way what constitutes proper behavior on the set of a Woody Allen film.  Woody Allen films aren’t ‘Nam, Lucy, there are rules. (*cough*) FRIDAY IS NO-PANTIES DAY! (*cough, cough*)

“When I first met Woody [on the set of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger], I was in full costume and I went up to him and was very excited to meet him and gave him this huge hug,” she told us. “And he went completely silent and totally stiff. And I was like, ‘What have I done? I’m going to get fired.’ And everyone’s like, ‘You don’t touch Woody.’ I was less demonstrative for the rest of the shoot.” [NY Mag]

Hmmm, ‘you don’t touch Woody…’  (*puts on Carnac the Magnificent turban, holds envelope up to forehead*)  What is… the one thing no one ever taught you on the casting couch?  (*pantomimes golf swing, rocks back on heels, looks over to see if Kevin Eubanks is laughing*)

Sub-joke: 32 years old and she’s only just now learning that the woody goes stiff when you touch it?   …Clearly you’re not his stepdaughter.

Thanks, folks, I’ll be here all week.  Try the veal, and don’t forget to tip Chodin’s sister.  (*cartwheels off stage*)