On Film

...he was simply unable to "push away the horrible facts of our world...

...Another sweet young thing materializes in his hotel room and offers herself to him—with the enthusiastic approval of her husband, who is waiting patiently outside...

...Similarly, Alvy said that masturbation is "sex with someone I love," and that you try to get things to come out right in art because they never do in life...

...the alien responds...

...Sandy's three lovers—Isobel, Dorrie (Charlotte Ramp-ling) and Daisy (Jessica Harper)—are unbelievable in their unbounded adoration of him...

...You want to do mankind a real service...

...On Screen SEMINARS AND SUBURBS by robertasahina Stardust Memories Sandy Bates, a famous film director who is Woody Allen's latest screen persona, has a conversation with an alien who is just stepping back into his spaceship...

...It's a little hard to feel sorry for him, though, since Allen never bothers to explain why Sandy agreed to participate in the film weekend in the first place, or why his complaints are anything other than trivial...

...In that question I hear not the characters' intolerance but the filmmakers' wasp liberal guilt...

...Yeah," Sandy muses, "but I've got to find meaning in life...

...He doesn't seem to realize that a film like Interiors bombed because it was too shallow, not because it was too deep—or because reviewers are out to get him...

...The book begins with Conrad's trying feverishly to come up with reasons for getting out of bed and starting another day after his return home from the mental institution where he had spent several months...

...Sandy, it seems, has problems: His cook burns his food, his agent is incompetent, his lawyer harasses him, and his producers are tampering with his latest film...

...But after writing that, the director can't resist the self-serving temptation when it comes to his star...

...Again, when Sandy hustles Daisy at the Stardust, where she is attending the seminar with her boyfriend, a professor of film, there is not the slightest indication that she actually differs little from the other sycophants...

...After viewing his latest, largely autobiographical effort one can only hope he doesn't feel compelled to give us another movie next year about how badly it was treated...

...Conrad is momentarily picked out, and the point of this travelogue is suddenly clear: This is a Goddamn Serious Big Deal movie about the horrors of affluent suburban family life...

...A pale imitation of Fellini's 8 1/2, Stardust Memories, written, directed by and starring Woody Allen, merely lays bare his frantic need for public certification of his talent...

...Apparently it is not what Allen wants either...

...If Allen wants to live his fantasies on screen, that's fine—as long as what he is doing is clear to him and to us...

...Allen arbitrarily tries to make her "mysterious" by having her wear dark glasses and by inventing a past for her that involves lesbianism and other exotic traits...

...To be sure, Guest does not hesitate to let us know that Cal Jarrett, Conrad's father, is a very successful Chicago tax attorney, or that his wife, Beth, is the perfect suburban housewife and mother...

...Timothy Hutton is absolutely splendid as Conrad, especially since he is forced to do with his expressions and gestures what his character does in his head in the novel...

...His weekend at the Stardust rapidly turns into a nightmare, too: He is beset by fawning fans seeking his autograph, sycophantic cine-maphiles demanding pearls of wisdom, and flattering fund-raisers begging his endorsement of their charitable activities...

...He just wants to be alone...

...Several scenes have been created that are not in the book: of Beth compulsively rearranging the tableware, for example, or squirming out of having her picture taken with her son at his first family party after coming home...

...Sandy asks...

...Poor Sandy...

...Compared to this egregious mess, Annie Hall, which I loathed, was a masterpiece of comic realism...

...Allen recycles all the safe and predictable comic situations that have worked for him in the past...

...Sandy first picks up Dorrie when she is acting in one of his films, without any intimation that their relationship might be motivated by anything except mutual infatuation...

...But, once again, the film makers underscore something that is handled with subtlety in the book...

...Far from being a portrait of an artist, Stardust Memories is a caricature of, and by, a celebrity...

...Unfortunately, good intentions cannot compensate for the fact that Redford and his screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, totally mishandle their adaptation of Judith Guest's best-seller about the agonized re-entry of a teenage boy, Conrad Jarrett, into the "normal world'' after a failed suicide attempt...

...Redford and Sargent, however, seem to have missed the desperate irony of Conrad's strategies for coping with all the mundane details of life...

...JL.t is somewhat easier to take Robert Redford seriously in his first attempt at directing, but only because he announces his good intentions in virtually every frame of Ordinary People...

...But it turns out that the gun isn't loaded...

...The writer/director gives the star the best scenes, the funniest lines and the most beautiful girls...

...The story concerns Sandy's soul-searching during a "film weekend" at the Hotel Stardust, where he is the principal lecturer and guest of honor...

...We enjoy your films," the alien tells him, "especially the early, funny ones...

...During a seminar, Sandy is asked, "Do you find it hard to direct yourself...

...Considering how unsympathetic Beth has been made, Mary Tyler Moore does well enough in the part, although it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the actress' and the character's nervousness...

...Just as Alvy Singer in Annie Hall was afraid of lobsters, Sandy is afraid of rabbits ("rodents") and pigeons ("rats with wings...

...The opening of the movie is the big tip-off...

...And there are freakish head-shots that suggest Allen is trying to be a cinematic Diane Arbus...

...Judd Hirsch is competent as Berger, Conrad's sympathetic psychiatrist...

...But the joke is on Allen, for as much as he wants to be considered a serious film maker and philosopher, the comic in him is hungry for laughs, and the conflict produces a movie neither funny nor profound...

...Unable to find a satisfactory way to dramatize his private pain on screen, they have changed Ordinary People from a psychological to a sociological drama...

...Redford and Sargent invent a scene where Conrad's grandmother flatly asks Beth, "Is he a Jew...

...Sandy claims he hates show biz, yet for all his esthetic pretensions, he remains in an industry that defines art in terms of box-office power...

...After the credits, the camera pans a body of water (Lake Michigan, we learn later), a park, some winding roads through a lovely suburb (Lake Forest, Illinois, outside Chicago), an attractive school building, and then the well-scrubbed wasp faces of the high-school choir that has been singing during the entire sequence...

...Each shot is carefully composed, painstakingly staged and beautifully lit...

...That Allen and his legion of admirers cannot tell the difference tells us much about the sad state of the cinema...

...He even has an aggrieved fan ("You're my hero," the man says before pulling the trigger) "kill" Sandy...

...He answers, "No, I just find it hard to resist the temptation to take extreme close-ups of myself...

...Allen simply has no perspective on his own ambitions...

...Allen does not so much as hint that Sandy's fame, fortune and power have something to do with their susceptibility to his otherwise dubious charms...

...through the drivelling Vivian Orkin (Helen Hanft), hostess of the Stardust seminar, Allen does viciously caricature Judith Crist and thus no doubt believes he has evened the score against all those nasty critics who don't appreciate his movies...

...the whole incident is a pretext for an inane fantasy sequence in which the "dead" Sandy's praises are sung to the heavens...

...An attractive young woman, a total stranger, asks him to autograph her left breast...

...Indeed, nothing in the film suggests that Allen possesses even a shred of self-consciousness about the costs and benefits of this kind of success...

...Devices that didn't succeed in the earlier movies show up here, too, including the pregnant pauses, blank walls and blank white screens of Interiors...

...This close encounter of the ridiculous kind reveals how anxious Allen is to disarm the criticism that has been leveled at him lately by making a gag out of it...

...you can only control art and masturbation, two areas I'm an expert at...

...What little new material there is in Stardust Memories is awful...

...It is therefore difficult to see how anyone can continue to take Allen seriously as a film artist...

...Alas, for an artist with such vision, "too much reality is not what the people want...

...While Donald Sutherland is better as Cal, Redford and Sargent have sentimentalized his part even more than they have distorted Moore's...

...Guest merely suggests the contrast between the introverted wasp teenager and his extroverted Jewish psychiatrist...

...But never mind...

...Isobel, his married lover (Marie-Chris-tin Barrault), leaves her spouse and unexpectedly turns up at the resort...

...One obvious problem with Stardust Memories is redundancy...

...But unlike the novelist, Redford and Sargent go out of their way to turn Beth, in particular, into an inhuman, frigid wasp monster...

...Sandy makes gratuitous references to Vietnam and to the Holocaust ("If I was born in Poland, I'd be a lampshade today") in a desperate stab at unearned gravity...

...Shouldn't I stop making movies and do something serious...

...Life is a Goddamn Serious Big Deal...

...Sandy combines the two observations and proclaims: "You can't control life, it's too messy...

...The strength of Guest's novel is its ability to render Conrad's anguish and uncertainty from his point of view, mostly through interior monologues...

...He saw reality too clearly," one mourner says...

...The thing that is missing here," he tells himself, "is a Sense of Humor...

...Tell funnier jokes...