Director Woody Allen is responsible for some of the most interesting feature films ever made, and some of the worst.  His latest work doesn’t fit into either category.  It actually fits somewhere in the middle of his oeuvre.  Comparatively, it is similar in tone to his 1985, “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”  That is all I want to say, as I do not want to give away the big spoiler.

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Owen Wilson portrays Gil Pender, a Hollywood screenwriter on holiday in Paris with his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents.  Gil is on vacation from being a Hollywood Hack and in the process of writing his “Great American Novel;” the theme of which is being enamored of the past.  You can tell from the beginning that he is not happy with either his life or his fiancé and wishes to be part of a better generation and era.

Inez, the direct opposite of Gil, is a materialistic ambitious character who is pretty much unlikable from the beginning.  Her mother is such a bitch that you cannot help but expect the same of her.  Her father is portrayed as a right-wing “tea bagger” who is constantly getting into arguments with the liberal Gil, mostly over politics.  There is never a point in the film when you feel the slightest sympathy for anyone in Inez’s family.  You just simply know that Inez will do something during the course of the film that will allow Gil to get out of the engagement and relationship.

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When British actress Charlotte Lewis first came forward to accuse fugitive director Roman Polanski of abusing her in 1983 at a press conference last week, one of the more intriguing statements was made by her attorney Gloria Allred:

“[Ms. Lewis] did present fresh complaint evidence to law enforcement, and it is in their possession.”

The Polanski-loving media didn’t mention this. They prefer a ”He Said, She Said” argument. Upon hearing this, however, my first thought was that a witness would be interesting, though obviously unlikely.

This is me speculating, but in a just-released statement Ms. Lewis might have revealed what that fresh complaint evidence is. And while it’s not a witness to the crime, it is the next best thing: (more…)

In November 1974, Werner Herzog received a most distressing phone call. Lotte Eisner, the beloved doyenne of German cinema, was dying. Part film historian, part published critic, part heroic preservationist, and part muse to the filmmakers struggling to piece together the broken shards of German culture left in the wake of the Nazis, Eisner was a legendary figure in Herzog’s eyes, and had inspired him to persevere through a decade of near-poverty as a struggling director. Now, at seventy-eight years old, she was deathly ill and not expected to survive.

Herzog was in Munich, Eisner in Paris, and their mutual friends implored the thirty-two-year-old director to fly to France post-haste so that he might say his goodbyes while there was still time. But Herzog would have none of it. “This must not be,” he remembered thinking. “German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death.” And so, suddenly afire with what he once called in another context “the fervor and woe of pilgrims and prayers and hopes,” Herzog made a momentous decision: he would set out from his apartment in Munich and walk the five-hundred miles to Paris “in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.”

Days stretched into weeks as he trod alone through the winter sleet, sometimes breaking into barns or empty cottages to survive the cold nights and taking only a single detour, “to the town of Troyes, because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.” Finally he arrived exhausted at Eisner’s Paris apartments to find her “still tired and marked by her illness,” but recovering against all odds. She would live nine more years, until at last, “when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films,” she called Herzog back to Paris and told him, “Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.” Herzog recalls that, “Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away,” and three weeks later Lotte Eisner died. (more…)

I suspect that because George Bush and Condoleezza Rice were so respectful of Muslims, constantly telling us that theirs is a religion of peace, some otherwise sensible Americans actually began to believe it.  Now we have a president who not only kowtows to a Saudi prince, but carries on as if Israeli homes are more threatening than Iranian nukes.

What is wrong with our leaders?  Are they worried that they won’t be invited to those cool Ramadan parties?  The Islamists have been actively at war with us for 30 years and generally at war with western civilization for well over a thousand years, and still we pay lip service to these people in a way we never did with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or the Soviet Union.  Is it because the Muslims commit sadism and murder in the name of religion and not country?  If anything, I would think that would make their evil acts all the more contemptible. (more…)