John, you're right that for some reason people seem to attack Woody when he makes a "light" film these days, as though he didn't start his career as a director of utterly light comedies. This happened even as recently as Scoop, which I thought was really fun and funny, but everyone else seemed to bash for not being as serious as Match Point. Personally, I'd say Bananas has not held up so well, and some of Woody's more recent straight-up comedies -- like Manhattan Murder Mystery, with its brilliant tribute to The Lady From Shanghai -- are much better. Then again, he's also made quite a few more substantial films in his late career as well.This comment followed a spot-on evaluation of Small Time Crooks, which you should abandon us to read now.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Small Time Crooks Re-visited
We're not sure who Ed Howard is, but we like him.
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2 comments:
Thanks a lot for the link. This is a great blog you've got going here, it's good to see such a clearinghouse of Woody info online. He's one of my favorite directors, I've been watching his films in more or less chronological order and am currently at the start of his Dreamworks period. I've found, fairly consistently, that even most of his critically derided films have tended to be at least worth seeing, and often outright great, which has led to my opinion that Woody's career is long overdue for a serious critical reevaluation.
You can find the rest of my Woody reviews at my blog as well, if you're interested: I've written about all his films from the early 80s to 2000 so far. The last few I wrote about were Sweet and Lowdown, Celebrity and Deconstructing Harry.
Ed,
Your reviews are some of the best going. I'm more than happy to alert readers to them.
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