Paul Harris (Wrongly) on the Irrelevance of Woody Allen

PERSONALLY, I don't give a hoot if a handful of so-called modern, "mainstream" Jews find Woody Allen's throwback Whatever Works irrelevant and passé, as Paul Harris reports (I use the word loosely) today in the Guardian. I didn't watch films like Annie Hall, Manhattan, Radio Days, Zelig, and Deconstructing Harry again and again to the point of obsession because I identified with them as a Jew—largely because I'm not—but because, in addition to being good to excellent films in their own right, they captured something of my own gripes, anxieties, aspirations, foibles, quirks, and passions. To say that his cinematic persona spoke exclusively to the American Jewish experience is a very narrow reading indeed. And judging from the looks of the new film's pre-release ratings on IMDB, I'm not the only one who feels this way. Unless, of course, all those high marks are from aging Jews from the old school who don't realize how hip they've become.

Rereading Harris' article a third time, I'm irked by this idiocy:

The most powerful producer in films today, Judd Apatow, the force behind Knocked Up, is Jewish. So are huge comedy stars such as Seth Rogen, Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler. Not a year in Hollywood goes by without all three of them churning out hit comedies.

The Apatow statement is inane and proves absolutely nothing. Has there ever been a time when there wasn't a powerful Jewish producer in Hollywood? Beyond that, the reason Rogen, Stiller and Sandler are "huge comedy stars" is because they, like Apatow, are churning out dipshit comedies for mass audiences. Once in a blue moon there's a Zoolander or a Punch-Drunk Love to partially redeem them, but a casual onscreen reference to Freud's Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Balzac ("There goes another novel"), or Bergman will never cross any of these actors' lips. To appreciate Allen, it helps to have read something besides FHM and the Sunday comics (even the groaners and slapstick gags in Bananas hinge on a knowledge of US politics, and the cornball Love and Death has a whole sequence of one-liners from the works of Dostoyevsky), and this cultured humor, not his religious background, is why Allen's never been completely on a par, popularitywise, with Harris' holy trio.

Whatever Works may have its flaws, but the mere fact that Allen has returned to the style of his earlier work is not one of them. The only thing grasping for relevance is Harris' fatuous article.