Rabbits, Blinkity

Woody Allen movies are excellent in many ways, but they irk me on a very profound level. Let's talk about it!

I recently had a discussion with a friend (Hi Steve!) about Allen's work and morality, or lack thereof. (Mostly vis-a-vis Roman Polanski and that whole stepdaughter thing.) The end result was, not wanting to be the sort of person who complains about things they don't watch, I agreed to make an attempt at some of his films. Thus, I was in the curious position of watching a Woody Allen film in entirety for the first time, while having previously read quite a bit of criticism about both him and his films, especially about to his supposed misogyny or lack thereof.

So I had assumptions. I expected a couple of possibilities. First, that the whole thing might be overblown, that his films would be at worst reasonably well made, original stories, which due to their tremendous influence would feel just a touch stale. Second, that they might be the worst sort of 1950s sexist and classist tripe, only considered worthwhile because that sort of thing tends to go over the heads of the (white, straight, male) critical establishment. Or most likely, some combination of both.
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There is a feeling, a weird feeling, where you know you should be working on something, something useful, valuable, or maybe only taxes, but you'd just rather not. Procrastination, we usually call it. So you do, you watch TV and do the laundry and cook an unnecessarily complicated meal and walk to the store instead of riding your bike, enough to make a college student the week before finals proud. But even after you've done all that, or even if you haven't, you still don't want to, but you want to procrastinate even less, because let's face it, TV gets boring after a while and nobody likes laundry ever. And the useful things aren't actually that annoying anyway, in fact you're supposed to like doing them for the most part. So why not, y'know, do them?

Some things do get done, though. Boring things. Hard things, even. And so I'm sitting here, watching Sanctuary and wondering how they managed to make so much show on so little budget, although the writing is still sometimes inexplicably clunky, and I also wonder why I temporarily blew out my ears playing the bass patch too loudly on my keyboard. And I suppose the answer is obvious. The difference is, the stuff that gets done is known, obvious, familiar. It's boring and hard, but easy because it's not creative. Or, it is creative, but a different kind of creative. There's a kind of semi-creative creativity that's familiar and straightforward—the kind of creativity you tap into…
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