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from: Alexander Star
to: Jim Holt

Woody Allen Repeats Himself

Posted Monday, May 6, 2002, at 6:29 PM ET

Who are these people?

Dear Jim,

I'm glad to hear that Woody Allen has mastered the subjunctive. What was it he wrote about the kid who has to translate T.S. Eliot's poems into English because vandals had broken into the school library and translated them into French? God, I used to love that stuff. But I wasn't planning to see Hollywood Ending; Allen's recent films have been too skimpy to spend $7 on. Even the line you cite is just a rehash of the bit in Annie Hall when Allen tells Diane Keaton that a relationship is like a shark that has to keep moving forward or else die, "and what we have on our hands is a dead shark." In Annie Hall, Allen delivers the line while flying on an airplane, which really does have to move forward to stay aloft. Now that's filmmaking.

I'm curious to know more about your trip to Paris. You say that you were there to play pingpong and make a movie about grief management; I'm hoping that only one of these statements is a lie, but which one? Was there much griping about the world's sole hyper power? In the latest issue of Granta, there's a symposium entitled "What We Think of America." The French entry comes from a novelist named Benoit Duteurtre, and he nicely skewers some of his countrymen's hypocrisies:

So the violence of American society couldn't be further from Europe's welfare system? Rhetoric aside, over the last thirty years France has allowed the growth of urban ghettos comparable to the worst of the American inner cities. So the European mind rejects the leveling-down effects of American culture? Yet it was a French socialist government that invited and financed the creation of Euro Disney. And besides, one might do well to wonder about the seductive power of American cinema or music, which have such a grip on the contemporary world, whereas European art can seem imprisoned in its cultural pretensions.

Seductive power, indeed. I was truly intending to leave Ozzy Osbourne out of the conversation, but his domination of Saturday's White House Correspondents' dinner has forced my hand. According to the Washington Post, Ozzy greeted the president by grabbing a "fistful of his stringy brown-and-pink hair" and yelling, "You should wear your hair like mine!" Bush's response: "Second term, Ozzy." Not too bad, really.

Til soon,
Alex

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Alexander Star
to: Jim Holt

Woody Allen Repeats Himself

Posted Monday, May 6, 2002, at 6:29 PM ET
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Jim Holt writes the "Egghead" column for Slate. He also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. Alexander Star is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. This fall, he will begin editing the "Ideas" section of the Boston Globe.
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