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" DEPENDING ON WHETHER HIS EARLY GOOF What&amp;#039;s Up Tiger Lily? makes the list, Woody Allen&amp;#039;s upcoming The Curse of the Jade Scorpion will be either the thirtieth or the thirty-first feature he&amp;#039;s directed, plugging away on a self-imposed schedule of roughly one Woody per annum that neither snow nor heat nor gloom of Mia has derailed since 1969. Despite the hush-hush aura that always cloaks Allen&amp;#039;s projects--clearly a mannerism by now, as it&amp;#039;s been decades since people were actually curious about them--word is that the cast is the usual clutch of eclectic ringers, including Helen Hunt, Charlize Theron, Dan Aykroyd, and Elizabeth Berkley (what, no Katie Holmes?), and that it&amp;#039;s a comic jewel heist set in the 1940s. Whenever Allen deals with crooks--a seemingly anomalous interest, but one that&amp;#039;s cropped up regularly in his work since Take the Money and Run--it&amp;#039;s usually his way of being folksy. But maybe we should be grateful that at least he isn&amp;#039;t asking us yet again to contemplate his own life, loves, and injured genius--his piques and valets.  No other American director is as celebrated for making movies steeped in his own circumstances and personality. But the self-regard that he disguises as self-scrutiny probably just bewilders moviegoers too young to recall the impact his voluble skittishness had a generation ago. Unless Dianne Wiest saying &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t speak&amp;quot; in Bullets Over Broadway counts, this onetime lodestar&amp;#039;s last real contribution to the trove of cultural tropes we live by was probably 1983&amp;#039;s expert little postmodern fantasy Zelig--whose title character&amp;#039;s name is still a byword, and whose central gimmick Forrest Gump shamelessly swiped. Otherwise, it took his private life&amp;#039;s eruption into early-nineties tabloid fodder, thanks to his bright idea of two-timing longtime consort Farrow with her adopted daughter--something Mia was bound to discover Soon-Yi or late-yi, no?--to make him riveting again. Even so, his reputation hasn&amp;#039;t merely survived the scandal. If anything, it&amp;#039;s grown, flourishing almost independently of both Soon-Yi&amp;#039;s graduation from college and her hubby&amp;#039;s negligible recent films. That isn&amp;#039;t only because David Lee Roth&amp;#039;s crack about rock critics liking Elvis Costello because they all look like Elvis Costello has always gone double with the &amp;quot;Woodman&amp;quot;--a nickname only critics use, wistfully affirming an intimacy that Allen doesn&amp;#039;t invite and the big audience doesn&amp;#039;t share. At sixty-five, he fills the culturati&amp;#039;s need for an Old Master. Martin Scorsese is the only other active candidate for the gig, and it&amp;#039;s probably not incidental that they&amp;#039;re the two most New York--identified movie directors around; the special stature both enjoy is due partly to East Coast chauvinism keeping a West Coast art form in its place. My main beef, though, is that intellectuals wouldn&amp;#039;t find Allen such a congenial Old Master if he hadn&amp;#039;t devoted his career to behaving like their preconception of one. He may not be a genius, but he&amp;#039;s a perfect, almost Zeligish facsimile; he&amp;#039;s been Buster Allen and Ingmar Allen and Federico Allen, though never Woody Guthrie. He&amp;#039;s got no problem flouting convention in his personal life, where some concern for the humdrum decencies would have been welcome, but he&amp;#039;s stayed hopelessly in hock to received wisdom in his artistic values--the area where great artists can and should break the rules. Aesthetically, he&amp;#039;s a reactionary for whom very little art of any merit or beauty, his own films presumably excepted, has appeared in the world since, say, 1972, the year Bergman&amp;#039;s Cries and Whispers came out. Even aside from his own retro bent, he&amp;#039;s like a lot of notables, in that time seems to have frozen for him the moment fame provided a refrigerator. It&amp;#039;s especially noticeable because the confluence of cultural vogues that turned him into a movie director was so peculiar and fleeting. Only in the chic, intellectually polyglot sixties would an interloping oddity like Woody have either looked attractive to a studio or approached the medium with his particular pretensions--pretensions that he started out burlesquing to hilarious effect, only to shift to indulging them in too many of the movies that followed the glorious Annie Hall, whose pleasures never fade, and Manhattan, which I thought was magical until I made the mistake of hurrying back to the theater to see it again a week later. Because Allen is either unwilling or unable to update his frame of reference, he&amp;#039;s increasingly shown himself to be something fatal for a satirist and a would-be moralist--namely, clueless about how people live. Forget the embarrassment of 1998&amp;#039;s Celebrity, his out-of-touch indictment of the contemporary scene. Even a deliberately slight caper flick like last year&amp;#039;s Small Time Crooks seemed caught in a fifties time warp. Worse yet, the moral turned out to be that insufferable old crapola about how the little people should be content with their lot instead of fatuously aspiring to higher things, particularly those of them that Woody himself proves he&amp;#039;s not one of by treasuring. It&amp;#039;s a message every bit as patronizing as his apparent calculation that this hackneyed little farce was his best bet to reingratiate himself with ticket buyers, even if the box-office receipts proved him right. However, his real cul-de-sac has been artistic, not commercial--and some of his attempts to find new creative wiggle room have been more interesting than the public&amp;#039;s general boredom with him would indicate. Allen&amp;#039;s basic repertoire of situations and attitudes is now so old hat that his later films have often resorted to arbitrary formal devices to simulate novelty: the documentary conceit in Husbands and Wives, the yuk-it-up Greek chorus in the vague Mighty Aphrodite. But the mock-musical framework of Everyone Says I Love You, however derivative--it was one more trip to Dennis Potter&amp;#039;s field--really did liven things up, gracefully pegging Woody&amp;#039;s jones for upper-crust couth and swank as the Eloise-and-Salinger fairy tale it had been all along and making something genuinely celebratory out of his familiar take on romance&amp;#039;s quiddities and vagaries. More pleasurable still was Bullets Over Broadway, Allen&amp;#039;s best film of the nineties. Much as the Hitchcock pastiche of Manhattan Murder Mystery put a fresh spin on his standard treatment of dissatisfied couples by letting them act out instead of talk out their problems, the jazz-age setting here got him out of his own precious head. When earnest young playwright John Cusack sat gabbing with his bohemian cronies, it was the same damn conversation Allen&amp;#039;s characters had been having for decades; yet it was suddenly charming, because their prattle was presented as a curio from an intellectual age of innocence. As if the movie&amp;#039;s richly informed affection for a bygone era was enough to allay Allen&amp;#039;s perennial fear that he&amp;#039;s lowering himself by being funny, it was also his most uninhibited comedy since the early seventies, waltzing through slapstick bits and gaga plot turns with surefooted flair. True, you couldn&amp;#039;t help but be curious as to whether any of Woody&amp;#039;s several shrinks noticed that Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, and Bullets Over Broadway all hinge on the murder of a troublemaking woman. (Maybe he talked to a different one about each.) He&amp;#039;s made a fetish out of heroines he can idealize as simple souls--nontroublemakers so docile that they make your favorite Teletubby look like Susan Sontag. We have Woody&amp;#039;s own ungentlemanly word for it that Soon-Yi is no dummy: &amp;quot;Am I going to spend my time with a mental deficient?&amp;quot; he said in Time magazine in 1992. So you wonder how she felt about being symbolically depicted as a literal dummy in Sweet and Lowdown, one of Allen&amp;#039;s most self-serving portraits of the artist--with boorish, insecure jazz guitarist Sean Penn redeemed not only by the beautiful music he leaves behind but by the adoration of a pure-hearted mute who advertises her placid relation to life&amp;#039;s bounty by stuffing her face in every scene. (Curiously, he&amp;#039;s got a real thing about women and food in his films; when he shares a meal with one, it&amp;#039;s code for sexual intimacy, which is why you&amp;#039;re alarmed when his Crimes and Misdemeanors character goes for pizza with his adolescent niece.) Allen has clearly reached a stage when he thinks he&amp;#039;s short-changing his own genius by not presenting it as both a given and a topic onscreen. Yet the less his recent films have engaged with his personal history and crotchets, the more tolerable they&amp;#039;ve been. Just because we didn&amp;#039;t have to look at his carping, overly familiar face, even Sweet and Lowdown went down easy after an atrocity like Deconstructing Harry, in which Allen played yet another autobiographical stand-in: a novelist whose messed-up, selfish life shrank into insignificance in an astonishingly narcissistic finale that featured all his fictional characters thanking him for inventing them. One reason this was incongruous is that creating a great gallery of characters isn&amp;#039;t what Allen&amp;#039;s known for. Another is that while his fantasy reprises of his own career take his greatness as an artist for granted, they usually omit the decisive fact that he&amp;#039;s a world-famous one whose efforts haven&amp;#039;t exactly gone unrewarded. Apart from Stardust Memories, a nasty movie whose repellent streak seems at least partly intentional, his many depictions of the creative life have always shied away from portraying the ultimate perk of creative success: power. Denying that he has any may be his most necessary lie--and Annie Hall&amp;#039;s famous flashback to Woody in the bumper cars may have been more prescient than it looked. It&amp;#039;s clearly decades too late to hope he&amp;#039;ll get his fixations out of his system; they are his system. But that doesn&amp;#039;t mean we can&amp;#039;t have regrets: If only he&amp;#039;d realized that Manhattan was an ending, not a blueprint. If only he&amp;#039;d gotten interested in something. I&amp;#039;d have loved to see his movies about politicians, say, or business. (Or even sports, which he does like.) It&amp;#039;s too bad this workaholic cares more about being perceived as an artist than he does about creating art. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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