Flavorwire looks at memorable movie endings.

Here’s a little clip that appears after the end credits in Married to the Mob. Ah, Michelle.

From our pal Diane Firstman:

From the wonderful Scouting NY site, here’s Annie Hall (part one).

It lacks a cohesive structure…

You can still find a good egg cream in New York. It was a drink from my father’s childhood and not one that I had with any regularity as a kid. Still, it’s a delicious treat. My cousin, who knows from these things, says there is only one chocolate syrup to use–it’s not just that it is the best, it is the only one to consider: Fox’s u-bet.

Man, I’m thirsty all of a sudden.

[Photo Credit: Seltzer Sisters]

Via the wonderful tumblr site Je Suis Perdu…

check

out

these  cool photographs

by Steve Schapiro.

Jay Z, Kanye West meet the Wood Man. Ya hoid?

[Photo Credit: Four Eyes]

Isn’t it Romantic?

In “Hannah and her Sisters,” Woody Allen goes to the Metro movie theater on Broadway and watches “Duck Soup,” the Marx Brothers’ finest movie and it restores his faith in life. I wasn’t have any kind of life crisis last night, there was just nothing on TV that interested me, so I put on “Animal Crackers,” the Marx Brothers’ second movie. It was released in 1930 and based on the stage play of the same name.

I hadn’t watched it in a few years and I laughed a lot. Pressed pause and said to the wife, “Look at Harpo, watch this, watch this,” and then laughed some more.

Later, she looked up from her book and said, “Wait, so that’s where you got that line from?”

Yup.

Watching the Marx Brothers makes life better.

He adored New York City. He idolised it all out of proportion.

Great shot of Yankee Stadium in this sequence.

Sunday and Monday on American Masters:

Watch Woody Allen: A Documentary on PBS. See more from AMERICAN MASTERS.

Classic New York scene at the old New Yorker movie theater.

And another one finds Woody at the Metro, also on Broadway on the Upper West Side:

Woody and Mia, before the fall:

“I could go on about our differences forever: She doesn’t like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don’t like it. She doesn’t like sports at all and I love sports. She loves to eat in, early — 5:30, 6 — and I love to eat out, late. She likes simple, unpretentious restaurants; I like fancy places. She can’t sleep with an air-conditioner on; I can only sleep with an air-conditioner on. She loves pets and animals; I hate pets and animals. She likes to spend tons of time with kids; I like to spend my time with work and only a limited time with kids. She would love to take a boat down the Amazon or go up to Mount Kilimanjaro; I never want to go near those places. She has an optimistic, yea-saying feeling toward life itself, and I have a totally pessimistic, negative feeling. She likes the West Side of New York; I like the East Side of New York. She has raised nine children now with no trauma and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day.”

[Picture via Kateoplis]

Drawings by Ricardo Fumanal.

For years Woody played his clarinet every Monday night at Michael’s. Missed the Academy Awards when “Annie Hall” won Best Picture because he was there instead.

How I pined to go when I was a teenager. But I never made it.  It was such a New York thing.

Anyone ever see him play there?

[Picture by François-Marie Banier]

Check out this great new site, Sportsfeat.com where vintage sports writing is celebrated. Dig this piece from Sport Magazine on Earl Monroe by the Wood Man:

I didn’t follow basketball until 1967. Baseball, boxing, and the theater provided most of my entertainment. The theater has since become boring and there are no plays approaching the pleasure given by a good sporting event. Even a game against a last-place team holds the possibility of thrills, whereas in the theater all seems relatively predictable. Baseball remains a joy for me, but basketball has emerged as the most beautiful of sports. In basketball, more than in virtually any other sport, personal style shines brightest. It allows for eccentric, individual play.

Give the basketball to such diverse talents as Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Walt Frazier, Rick Barry, George McGinnis, Dave Bing, or Bob McAdoo, to name a tiny fraction, and you get dramatically distinctive styles of dribbling, passing, shooting, and defensive play. There is great room in basketball for demonstrable physical artistry that often can be compared to serious dance.

So there I was in 1967 leafing through the sports section of a newspaper one day (I still read that section first) when I came across the name Earl Monroe. I had never heard of Monroe, knew nothing of his daily rookie brilliance nor ever heard of his astounding feats at Winston-Salem. I just liked the name, free-floating, three syllables, and euphonious to me. Earl Monroe. The name worked. (Years later, when I did a film called Sleeper, I named myself Miles Monroe. On me it was kind of a funny name.) I came across Monroe’s name again every few days as I glanced over the basketball box scores in a casual, disinterested way and noticed that he invariably led the scoring column.

I was All-Schoolyard, tell her, Max.

“Sports to me is like music…It’s completely, aesthetically satisfying. There were times I would sit at a game with the old Knicks and think to myself in the fourth quarter, This is everything the theatre should be an isn’t. There’s an outcome that’s unpredictable. The audience is not ahead of the dramatist. The drama is ahead of the audience, and you don’t know exatly where it’s going. You’re personally involved with the players–they had herioc demensions, some of those players. It’s a pleasurable experience, though not intellectual–much like music. It enters you through a diferent opening, sort of…

You see, life consists of giving yourself these problems that can be dealt with, so you don’t have to face the problems that can’t be dealt with. It’s very meaningful to me, for instance, to see if the Knicks are going to get over some problem or another. These are matters you can get involved with, safely, and pleasurably, and the outcome doesn’t hurt you.”

Woody Allen to David Remnick, 1994

Well said, though I’m sure some fans would argue about not being hurt. Last night’s loss was a tough one, doesn’t matter that the Celtics should have mopped the floor with them. Carmelo Anthony was brilliant but Jared Jeffries will be the memory that doesn’t go away from this one. And that hurts, man.

Pauline Kael on Woody’s first trip into heaviosity, Interiors:

The people in Woody Allen’s Interiors are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman.

Interiors looks so much like a masterpiece, and has such a super-banal metaphysical theme (death versus life) that it’s easy to see why many regard it as a masterpiece: it’s deep on the surface. Interiors has moviemaking fever, all right, but in a screwed-up form — which is possibly what the movie is all about.

The movie is so unfunny it’s not even funny. Actually, it’s so unfunny that it’s funny, which is funny because the last thing it wants to be is funny.

From a terrific WFMU piece–The Early Woody Allen:1952-1971:

Rollins and Joffe’s assertion that Woody could be the Jewish Orson Welles, a triple threat of writer, director and performer, persuaded him to take to the stage. Allen spent several months preparing an act and his debut was at a coveted headliner’s room, arranged by his management. Woody stood up at The Blue Angel in the summer of 1960 after comedian Shelley Berman’s Saturday night late show. Berman was gracious enough to introduce Woody after his own act, an unconventional procedure to be sure. “Here is a young television writer who is going to perform his own material. Would you please welcome a very funny man… Woody Allen.” Larry Gelbart was in the audience that evening and described Woody as “Elaine May in drag,” as Woody lifted several of her mannerisms. Despite what was, at times, a lack of stage presence, Allen’s material shone through and various showbiz job offers came in. Rollins turned them all down. Woody wasn’t ready yet, he said. He needed to grow. He needed to polish. In the meantime, he stunk.

“I always thought the material alone mattered, but I was wrong,” says Woody, “I thought of myself as a writer and when I was onstage all I could think about was wanting to get through the performance and go home. I wasn’t liking the audience … I was petrified. Yet there was no reason the audience wouldn’t like me… they had paid to see me … But then I went onstage with a better attitude and I learned that until you want to be there and luxuriate in the performance and want to stay on longer, you won’t do a good show.” Jack Rollins recalled that, “He knew zero about the art of performing and bringing the material on a nice silver platter to the audience. He was successful with a segment of the audience that had the brainpower to know what was there. But he didn’t help himself because he didn’t know anything about pacing his material, or stopping for laughs.” Joffe added that, “He was arrogant and hostile … If the audience didn’t get it, he had no patience … the pain in those first years was terrible.” Allen was often despondent. “It was the worst year of my life. I’d feel this fear in my stomach every morning, the minute I woke up, and it’d be there until eleven o’clock at night.” Nearing the end of 1960 he told them, “This is crazy. It’s killing me. I’m throwing up, I’m sick, I shouldn’t be doing this. I know I can make a big career as a writer. We’ve tried it with me as a stand-up and I’m not good. I can’t handle this anymore.” Rollins and Joffe never stopped reassuring Woody and constantly encouraged him. They knew he’d gain his chops but Joffe also admitted in retrospect, “Woody was just awful.” Jay Landesman who booked Allen in his club said, “Woody was terrified of an audience. He used to pace the dressing-room floor muttering, ‘I hope they like me. I hope they like me.’ They didn’t.”

Dave Itzkoff interviews the Wood Man in the Times:

Q. How do you feel about the aging process?

A. Well, I’m against it. [laughs] I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you’d trade all of that for being 35 again. I’ve experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That’s what happens to Anthony Hopkins at the beginning of the movie, and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife, “Oh, you can’t keep doing that — you’re not young anymore.” Yes, she’s right, but nobody wants to hear that.

Q. Has getting older changed your work in any way? Do you see a certain wistfulness emerging in your later films?

A. No, it’s too hit or miss. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything that I do. It’s whatever seems right at the time. I’ve never once in my life seen any film of mine after I put it out. Ever. I haven’t seen “Take the Money and Run” since 1968. I haven’t seen “Annie Hall” or “Manhattan” or any film I’ve made afterward. If I’m on the treadmill and I’m scooting through the channels, and I come across one of them, I go right past it instantly, because I feel it could only depress me. I would only feel, “Oh God, this is so awful, if I could only do that again.”

[Photo Credit: Suzanne DeChillo, NY TImes]

When critics discuss Woody Allen’s best films, or the great films of the 1980s, I’m consistently disappointed that there isn’t more discussion of his 1987 picture Radio Days. Coming on the heels of his great and somewhat audacious Hannah and Her Sisters, audiences and critics alike seemed to mistake Radio Days as something slight – a fine, funny movie, but not a major statement. As time passes, it becomes clearer and clearer that Radio Days is one of Allen’s most perfectly realized films.

Joe (Seth Green), is the narrator/Woody as a child, a radio-obsessed kid living in Rockaway Beach with his parents (Michael Tucker and Julie Kavner, both excellent), his grandparents, cousin Ruthie, Uncle Abe (Josh Mostel) and Aunt Ceil, and his sweetly optimistic spinster Aunt Bea (Diane Wiest).  The film is full of cameos by Allen veterans and notable character actors: Jeff Daniels, Tony Roberts, Danny Aiello, Wallace Shawn, Kenneth Mars, et al. Even Diane Keaton appears as a singer late in the film.

However, it’s Allen’s stand in family that remains the heart of the piece. Radio Days is the most warm-hearted film of Allen’s career and one of his most personal statements. It’s a love letter not only to the pre-TV days when radio ruled American consciousness, but also to family and childhood and to the stories we tell and the way we tell them.

Radio Days has a unique structure: we don’t follow a story from beginning to end, rather we get served a series of anecdotes that are conjured up by the songs and shows of 1940s radio. Allen serves as the voice-over narrator, stringing together memories and commentary on the action, which splits time between a fictionalized version of his own family and childhood, the glamorous world of the radio stars themselves and the rise of Sally White (Mia Farrow) a cigarette girl who dreams of radio stardom.  (Allen’s narration functions much like the greek chorus of stand up comics did in Broadway Danny Rose.)

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