Pictureland

Over forty years into his career as a film director, Woody Allen keeps going.  This has become both a kind of grim certainty and, only very rarely, a virtue.  Over the past 15 to 20 years, Allen has been like a man trying to mount a sumptuous feast who finds himself thrashing around in an empty pantry.  In lieu of something fresh, we get warmed-over dishes, whose recipes might not have been such a good idea in the first place. Since 2005, he has frequently done what had long seemed unthinkable, set and film several of his projects somewhere other than the island of Manhattan.  The first such effort, Match Point (2005), was his strongest in years, imbued with a gravity not seen in a Woody Allen film since Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Mixed results followed:   Vicki Christina Barcelona (2008), a shiny wet dream of a film; the vastly-overrated Midnight in Paris (2011), a lot of half-baked philosophy, self-indulgence and artistic name-dropping hid behind s...

He must be stopped.  I realize that he's old, diminutive and myopic (boy, is he myopic), but don't be fooled. He keeps rampaging through Western Civilization. For decades, he roamed the streets of New York (mainly Manhattan, mind you). It was believed that he couldn't survive out of his native habitat, but then he somehow crossed the Atlantic and was let loose on London and English culture. The results, for the most part, were not pretty. He crashed briefly through the streets of Barcelona. And now, I am sorry to report, he has landed in Paris. And it gets worse. His damage has taken on a new dimension; it's no longer just spatial, it's temporal. Woody Allen is delving into the past to divest long-dead artists - fortunately, he has little concern for anyone else - of their ability to sound even remotely human. If this is allowed to continue, before you know it the Renaissance will be here and everyone will sound completely ridiculous. So yes, Wood A...