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Friday 10 February 2012

In praise of Woody Allen, for once

While his films may have gone off the boil, to put it mildly, his collection of sketches and stories gets a rave from the LA Times:

As fictioneer, Allen has the ear of a comedian and the erudition of a Carnegie Deli waiter with a PhD in European literature... It's a postwar world preserved in kosher amber, from which the author wrings reliable laughter and insight. (How many times has Philip Roth revisited Newark?) Taken in one gulp, the recurring routines may put off an unwary reader. Then again, no one complained about John Lee Hooker repeating riffs. As writer and performer, Woody Allen has one leg in vaudeville comedy, one in literature, one in Hasidic parable and one in Freudian analysis. That's four legs — two fewer than Kafka's Gregor Samsa...

[Photo: A view of Tom Suriya's mural, You Are The Star, on display in Hollywood. Woody Allen is in the third row, behind Mae West.  Credit: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images]

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