The UFO seem to have arranged it all in advance as if to show Bates that w e may not get what we desire in life, but if we pay attention, there are exquisite things right in front of us. At the big moment, though, instead of a UFO, they see weather balloons. As Moonlight Serenade plays dreamily in the background, the giant balloons swim through the air. They come upon some people in a field waiting to see a UFO. "He hasn't stolen from Fellini," Canby wrote, "without knowing what to do with the purloined material."įor me, the mystery of Stardust Memories is solved in a scene near the film's end, when Bates and Daisy take a walk to escape the crowd at the hotel. Meanwhile, The New York Times' Vincent Canby gushed over Stardust Memories, calling it "a marvelous movie, sometimes breathtaking in its effects." As for Allen's borrowing from Fellini, Canby wasn't concerned. So why was he calling them a bunch of ugly psychopaths? When Annie Hall won the Oscar for Best Picture, it felt like a personal victory for his fans. Like me, they felt smart for liking him. He spoke for every articulate schmuck who wanted and lost the beautiful WASP girl. Allen's fans had always felt a peculiar kinship with him. Fans, in particular, weren't sure what to make of what seemed like a full-on assault on them. "It needs some larger idea, some sort of organizing force, to pull together all these scenes of bitching and moaning, and make them lead somewhere." Many critics and fans concurred. “Stardust Memories is a disappointment," wrote Roger Ebert in his Chicago Tribune review. "We love your movies," an alien tells him, "especially your early funny ones." The gift of laughter, after all, is a big one. ![]() Before the shooter fires, he tells Bates, "I'm your biggest fan." As Bates straddles the line between life and death, his spirit has an encounter with aliens who tell him he should make more comedies. Then, i n an eerie scene foreshadowing the murder of John Lennon by only a few months, one of Bates' fans draws a gun and shoots him. One woman breaks into Bates' room and offers to have sex with him while her husband waits downstairs. The fans come off as pushy, and cloying, mentally sick, bordering on sociopathic. They're Day of the Locust crazy. He walks past them, his face hidden by sunglasses, their faces coming toward him like characters in a nightmare. The film's most memorable set piece, and the subject of controversy when the film was released, is when Bates arrives at the hotel in Ocean Grove and is greeted by a small mob of fans. The conventional history is that Stardust Memories was Allen's revenge against the audience for not buying tickets for Interiors (1978). In the months before Stardust Memories was released, I'd become familiar with Allen's older movies. They'd become staples of late night television, and I liked the way he weaved the sophisticated with the silly. I'd heard rumours that his recent films weren't funny, but I was simply excited to see a new Woody Allen film on a big screen. It was as if Allen was setting the pace and daring us to follow. Richard Freeman of the Newhouse News Service complained of the constant flashbacks as "so cryptic that much of the film's plot is unduly fragmented and confusing." But I liked it. It had plots within plots, movies within movies. Stardust Memories was so different from Allen's usual work. He dreads meeting his fans, for he knows they will grill him about why he no longer makes funny movies. Worse, Bates has been invited to the Stardust Hotel in New Jersey for a retrospective of his films. As an expression of mental anguish the photograph was brilliant, but why would a man decorate his apartment with such a thing? As one of the annoying critics portrayed in the film might say, the photograph seems to parallel the stress and anxiety felt by Bates, a film director who, like Allen at the time, was struggling to switch from comedy to a more serious style.īates is also haunted by the death of a close friend inept studio executives have butchered the ending of his latest film and he's trying to get over a recent relationship with Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), a pill-popping neurotic. Throughout the early scenes of Allen's Stardust Memories, the photo of police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Nguyen Van Lem on a Saigon street hovers over everything like a thought balloon in a comic strip. photograph of a Vietcong prisoner being shot in the head, an early tip that Woody Allen was upping the ante here. You knew something was up when you saw Sandy Bates' apartment. One entire wall was taken up with Eddie Adams' famous A.P.
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