Understand any refusal to watch but the Woody Allen Club Random is a fascinating study in 2 awful but polar opposite men’s reactions to public scrutiny. Maher keeps trying to get Allen to admit cancel culture hurt him but Allen keeps saying “Actually I was very lucky and lived a great life”
"I groomed my girlfriend's daughter and faced no consequences beyond dirty looks from people, my fans romanticse it" would leave you feeling pretty invincible I imagine
Bill Maher is so unhinged in this ep that at one point, Woody Allen has to defend the Me Too movement
It’s genuinely alarming that Bill Maher is able to make anyone next to him seem normal in comparison. Maher tries to rag on Chalamet and Gerwig for denouncing and Allen is like “I dunno, I get it. They were very nice to work with, I have no problems with them.” It’s insane to watch
Woody Allen is a self aware perv
I gotta think the difference is that Allen, although obviously an all-time creep, is legitimately an artist who has made great stuff, while Maher is just a complete hack and he knows it deep down.
Yeah like he’s a monster but Allen objectively does have an influence and a legacy. Maher knows he can’t fall back on this if it all goes to hell
People will keep watching Annie Hall even after everything, Religiulous ain't making Sight and Sound
Heartbreaking: One of the Worst Men You Know Made Annie Hall
wait this sounds great
It’s objectively a TERRIBLE interview, but it’s a fascinating trainwreck
wild shit
Sounds like Woody's funniest bit in decades.
While I’m incredibly hesitant to say I “respect”(?) Allen’s position, it’s interesting that he’s chill and self aware about the whole thing. He made critically acclaimed movies for decades, still pumps one out occasionally, he remains admired by some, all things considered he got off pretty easy.
Meanwhile Bill Maher has people call him a prick for talking about how bombing Palestinians is fine actually and he thinks civilization is collapsing.
What was Woody’s impetus for appearing? He doesn’t seem to have any new films to promote.
Probably just enjoying the opportunity to talk about himself. Usually he has to pay his expensive therapist for that.
The analysis is terrible...and such short sessions!
I use that joke so often, but hate having to credit him. 😂
I still can't comprehend what Woody Allen did to make Hollywood successfully spend decades gaslighting America into thinking he's one of the funniest human beings ever It's SNL levels of dissonance where you're watching absolute garbage but so many people think his work is the pinnacle of comedy
A lot of people think he does light comedic riffs on European films, but personally it just looks like plagiarism to me By the time he essentially remade Streetcar and removed all the sexual tension and was praised for it, I decided a lack of cultural literacy is part of the issue here
I've never understood it either. Annie Hall sucks. The only Woody Allen movie I ever liked was Blue Jasmine and it's probably because he didn't act in that one
I think it’s a very particular style of comedy. Very New York, very Jewish, it’s easy to put be put off by it if you’re not on that wavelength.
Do you know how morally bankrupt you have to be to make Woody Allen look like a nice guy? Only Maher is capable of doing that!
lol, lmao even
lol Jesus
……………..what.
Once again, understand anyone not wanting to watch for obvious reasons, but it’s like shocking how badly this all goes for Maher
I know Bill Maher being a contrarian piece of shit is his entire brand at this point, but good lord, imagine coming off as worse than WOODY ALLEN.
What’s his argument in favour?
He basically just says it helped a lot of women get justice. You do have to factor in that he’s Woody Allen, but he seems reasonable and normal next to Maher
I would watch but Bill Maher’s voice is like nails on a chalkboard
Hate when 2 favs disagree in a scholarly debate
Really feels like the dichotomy between bourgeoisie who have melted their brains by being extremely online vs a mostly offline one who simply enjoys their bounty.
Woody's at peace with going to Hell, Bill's still pretending it doesn't exist.
There was a piece a few years ago critiquing Allen's autobiography, and the critic made a pretty solid case that Allen is a sociopath. Just totally unbothered by anything occurring outside himself.
Certainly not surprising
So basically the autobiographical character in Crimes and Misdemeanors is actually the one Martin Landau played.
I know exactly the piece you're talking about, and the passage that made him think this, and I think about it all the time
I skimmed it out of curiosity & this is a fair conclusion. It’s 400 pages of painstaking detail of every banal experience or obsession he’s ever had & near the end he says “I haven’t said much about the art of directing bc I have no insight about that”. Like, just in his own world.
I like this assessment. Seems spot on from what I have just read.
For everything that sucks about Maher it shouldn't be neglected that he is also objectively one of the worst interviewers of all time - dedicated solely to only having his subjects regurgitate his own chosen viewpoint, and completely unable to reorient the discussion if they fail to do so
I know it's easy to get hyperbolic with people like Maher, but it genuinely feels like the worst interview ever recorded? Like on so many levels it's genuinely stupefying
If ever there were an example of a guy that cancel culture didn’t hurt even a teeny tiny bit…
Ask the women in his life how lucky they were and what kind of life they've had.
I will chalk this up to Maher’s desperation for relevancy making him think that what happened to Allen — his media career evaporating — is the worst thing that could happen to anyone. But Allen was not actually a super ambitious artist and has probably enjoyed retirement.
Right; I think he mostly enjoyed working and living the life of his dreams in the Upper West Side of Manhattan with occasional forays into Europe. When was his last really great movie? Husbands and Wives? He was never very sociable, what does all this really mean to him?
Honestly I don’t think any of his movies are all that great; he benefited a lot from working with great actors. When you try to think about visually memorable well-directed shots in his movies it’s hard to come up with much. But yeah basically he artistically went downhill after the Mia years.
Careful with this framing, this is edging close to Gordon Willis (and Carlo Di Palma, and Sven Nykvist, hell even the wasted talents of Zhao Fei*) erasure. But I would also say his background is closer to Broadway and Television and is mostly talky, and those performances can’t come from nowhere.
(*one of his very few post Miramax films I’d put up with, like, Radio Days or something, is Sweet and Lowdown, a mockumentary with Sean Penn as “the second greatest Jazz guitarist ever” backed with a lot of talking heads and an excellent score played by Howard Alden)
I mean I can’t claim he didn’t get great performances out of people. Which is unfortunate to have to say because by all accounts he treated his actors like shit. But a lot of actors are very insecure and maybe that motivated them to try to win his praise (which never worked)
That might be bc back in those days he shot & edited every film completely then rewrote, reshot & re-edited it. Easy to make things better when you do that. I doubt he kept that habit up in later years since he didn’t have enough funding.
(I want to qualify this by saying he was a perfectionist about his movies at some point but he was also lazy & wasteful in his methods, and at the point he was cancelled he was pretty much just taking tourist board money to make movie-length travel ads. He wasn’t very motivated anymore.)