IT SEEMS WOODY AND WOODY WERE HISTORY TOO.

The last laugh (the Australian, Fiona Morrow, July 10, 2004)

There was a time when, offered the chance to interview Woody Allen, I'd have accepted with a mixture of excitement, awe and not a little love. Yes, once Woody was one of my heroes.

I loved Annie Hall, adored Manhattan. Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters - these were films I would watch again and again at the drop of a hat, rapt in their loopy romance. I loved it when he got a little serious - Husbands and Wives, Crimes and Misdemeanors - and even the Bergmanesque offerings were just about interesting enough. Yes, I was a Woody groupie.

It's years now since I watched one of those early Allen films. Not even Hannah and Her Sisters, a movie I would put on sometimes just to revel in the anticipation of Michael Caine delivering to Barbara Hershey the e.e. cummings quote: "Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." Sigh.

But I just can't do it. I can no longer wallow in the glory of the rainy-day planetarium scene in Manhattan or laugh at the lobsters running amok in Annie Hall. When I'm after a sure-thing comedy these days, it'll be Albert Brooks or Preston Sturges every time.

Why? Well, I guess you've guessed. News of his relationship with Soon-Yi, the adopted teenager over whom he'd been in loco parentis (however semi-detached) for eight very impressionable years instantly made Manhattan (where Allen's character dates Tracy, a high-school girl) unwatchable. Then I read Mia Farrow's autobiography, What Falls Away - and that, I'm afraid, was that. Woody and I were history. [...]

Lame, risible and just plain unfunny, Allen's recent work has lost its currency. The best that can be said of his newest piece, Anything Else, is that it's not as bad as the last two - which, frankly, isn't saying much.

Sublime art often comes from wrestling with sin and temptation, but never from denying or surrendering to them. That is the connection between sublime and sublimation.