|
Thanks for the compliment. Needless to say I enjoy your posts here, too.
I only really like a handfull of Woody Allen films, roughly those from Annie Hall through to Hannah and Her Sisters. For me, though, even that period is a bit inconsistent, and I'd definitely put Stardust Memories as one of his lesser ones. It's a while since I last saw it, but it does seem more like a tribute to loads of other films, rather than a substantial one in its own right. The intro is definitely a homage to 8 1/2 and there are other references to Bergman and some others in it.
Regarding Ed Wood, I think there are far worse filmmakers than him, they just have better technical staff. Wood was working with fellow amateurs on a shoestring. But that's not so different from a lot of punk bands, and you'd rarely hear people dismissing punk as being simply 'so bad it's good', at least not nowadays. It's a shame that while fans of almost every other art form have embraced a quite open attitude to ideas of quality, film fans on the whole still seem hung up on a really quite rigid idea of it. Ed Wood never made a film as 'bad' as say Transformers 2 but Michael Bay will never be written off or ghettoised in the way that Ed Wood has simply because on the surface Bay's films look expensive and polished. Imagine where we'd be if that were applied to music: wall to wall Meat Loaf.
|