Recently I have been rewatching some of Woody Allen’s stuff, most of which I had not seen in some time. If nothing else, I remembered liking LOVE AND DEATH and BLUE JASMINE. But after rewatching ANNIE HALL for the first time in like a decade . . . I gotta say, I completely agree with everything my hero Orson Welles once said about the guy:

ORSON WELLES: I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

HENRY JAGLOM: I’ve never understood why. Have you met him?

ORSON WELLES: Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.

HENRY JAGLOM: He’s not arrogant; he’s shy.

ORSON WELLES: He is arrogant! Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world—a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.

Allegations aside, I too have this sort of primordial revulsion to him physically, and I can’t stand the way he talks and carries himself. It is true that there is a mock-bashful arrogance to him as Orson pointed out. And without even particularly looking for it, I couldn’t help but notice that there are a fair amount of jokes (?) involving children and I know you know what I’m talking about.

My friend Jess put it best in her review of HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, which is actually a pretty good movie:

Yeah, how about that!

It’s a shame because I’m all about a prolific director making low-budget films with their friends the way Bergman used to . . . films that feel like little paperback novels! And heaven help me, I love movies set in New York in the 70s / 80s. And I even like some of Woody Allen’s stuff. Dude is good at the thing he does. But whenever he’s on screen with his stupid little haircut and glasses, stuttering and stammering and dropping these snide little one-liners, my skin starts to crawl. The guy is a flat-out creep.

An aside: While we’re here, I may as well drop Orson’s thoughts on Ingmar Bergman:

ORSON WELLES: I don’t condemn that very northern, very Protestant world of artists like Bergman; it’s just not where I live. The Sweden I like to visit is a lot of fun. But Bergman’s Sweden always reminds me of something Henry James said about Ibsen’s Norway—that it was full of “the odor of spiritual paraffin.” How I sympathize with that! I share neither Bergman’s interests nor his obsessions.

For myself, unless a film is hallucinatory, unless it becomes that kind of an experience, it doesn’t come alive. I know that directors find serious and sensitive audiences for films where people sit around peeling potatoes in the peasant houses—but I can’t read that kind of novel either. Somebody has to be knocking at the door. I figure that is the way Shakespeare thought, so I can’t be in bad company!

(I love Ingmar Bergman, but he ain’t wrong here . . .)

ANYWAY

. . . that’s all I have to say about Woody.

Uh. Yikes!