The Bleeding Heart Show

Woody’s European enablers

Shorter Joe Queenan: when will you goddamned Euro-commies wake up and realise that Woody Allen is never going to make another decent film, no matter how much of your America-hating lucre you fling at him?

Americans can be blamed for many things, but the perpetuation of Allen’s zombie-like career is one atrocity for which we refuse to be held accountable. It is Europeans who are providing much of the money for these projects, Europeans who are welcoming the director to their communities, Europeans who are marching through the turnstiles in support of Allen’s interchangeably neurasthenic films. Europeans are the ones paying the freight for Allen’s cavalcade of duds.

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If you people on your side of the Atlantic are going to keep funding this hokum, you’re going to have to accept the responsibility. My greatest worry is that Allen will keep this European tour going for the rest of his life, dropping in on one gullible country after another, making a couple of locally financed films and then blowing town before the stench hits.

I can see a Zagreb-based Woody Allen film where the director plays a washed-up Serb stand-up comic whose career is suddenly revived by meeting a perky Bosnian-American exchange student played by Thandie Newton. I can see a Polish Woody Allen film about a washed-up klezmer player whose career is revived by a chance encounter with a Santa Cruz forensic scientist (Tina Fey) investigating Chopin’s suspicious death. I can see a Macedonian film about a social-climbing rag merchant who keeps getting visits from a ghost who claims to be Alexander the Great, but is actually a delusional Second Avenue deli counter man named Herbie Schlegel.

Well, when Norman Wisdom’s career was effectively finished, he made up for it by visiting an adoring Albania where he’s regarded with the same fondness as some people have for Elvis. So all we need to do is find Woody a similar small country that’s willing to shower him in unreserved adulation and forgive his increasingly desperate & regrettable films. Freedonia, anyone?