In 1992, Woody Allen released Husbands and Wives, a scathing and hilarious excoriation of married life among the Upper East Side's moneyed, intellectual set. Filmed in a faux-documentary style, Allen's married protagonists examined their own feelings on camera, ranging from a separated couple's failed experimentation with the single life, to a passive-aggressive wife's flowering office crush, to a husband's sexual attraction to his 21 year old student. Eerily, in that same year, Allen split up with long-time partner and collaborator Mia Farrow in order to legitimize his love affair with her 17-year-old adopted daughter Soon Yi Previn. His films have never been the same. Thirteen years later, Husbands and Wives stands as the last great Woody Allen film, and a long line of unsuccessful, not very pleasurable work stands between it and Allen's latest movie, Melinda and Melinda. There are certainly movies since 1992 that I enjoy; Sweet and Lowdown and Bullets Over Broadway being the two that are pleasant exceptions to the disappointing rule. Looking back over his career since the greatness of Husbands and Wives to the brand new Melinda and Melinda, a few trends emerge that seem to offer insight into the problematic nature of Allen's work over the past thirteen years.

It would be ridiculously disingenuous for me to speculate as to what toll Allen's personal decisions may or may not have had on his creative life. There is the temptation to associate Allen's high-profile break-up and marriage with his box-office denouement, to factor in his creative divorce from longtime Producer Jean Doumanian as being somehow symbolic. And what about the studio hopping in recent years, including his recently concluded four-film deal with DreamworksSKG, an on again/off again relationship with Miramax, and the recent distribution deal with an en fuego Fox Searchlight? In light of the creative freedom that Allen has successfully secured (and rightfully earned) in his filmmaking relationships, and regardless of the machinations of his personal and professional relationships, I think it is important instead to look at the work itself. The thematic, character, and aesthetic choices Allen has made since the release of Husbands and Wives speak volumes about the quality of the work. One need look no further than the films themselves to discover the trends and themes which have emerged and that have, I believe, contributed to Allen's descent from essential American auteur to fallen idol.

Instead of my usual long-form writing, I thought I would put together some brief thoughts that have been swimming around my flu-infested brain this week...

-- Looks like I picked the wrong week to be sick. After reading about all of the ups and more ups from this week's SXSW Festival, I've got a little bit of Austin envy. Congrats to Matt Dentler and the gang for what appears to be another great festival.

-- Don't know if anyone else watched, but my roommate and I had a lot of fun pulling our hair out at the choices made by the team at Bravo for their 100 Scariest Movie Moments. Jaws #1? No no no. The Exorcist should be #1! A who are we kidding? Any movie that gets Billy Graham to postulate that William Friedken actually captured the devil's spirit on film, well, that's what we call a scary movie. Injustices abound on this list. Poltergeist #80? Lower than Willy Wonka and Signs? Hahaha. Whew. I don't know when those people grew up, but Poltergeist scared me senseless as a kid.

-- Recently, J treated me to a night at the theater to see the incredible Kate Valk star in the Wooster Group's awe inspiring production of HOUSE/LIGHTS, a play that unites Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights with Joseph Mawra's film Olga's House of Shame. How is Ms. Valk not the most sucessful actress in the city? She is dazzling, intense, and a total powerhouse. I can't recommend the show highly enough. Film lovers will be thrilled, theater lovers, energized. It's the best thing I've seen in forever. Tonight, I repay the favor with tickets to Neil LaBute's This Is How It Goes (review to follow in the coming days).

In The Whole Equation, an infuriating and highly enjoyable new book by David Thomson, the author ponders the differences between two of 1939's most renowned films; Jean Renoir's Le Régle du Jeu and David O. Selznick's (let's be honest about whole the Victor Fleming thing, shall we?) Gone With The Wind:

"There's room enough to love both films; the all time success and the box-office failure, the landmark and the masterpiece. But observe how fully the Renoir picture is committed to real nature and human nature: the array of characters in which the seem more from life than from a fashion magazine; the general eschewing of adoring close-ups by Renoir in favor of a camera style that keeps people in groups, in social interaction; the way the French film employs locations, a true out-of-doors and real rooms. There is never a dull moment or a plain view in Gone With The Wind ; is that one reason why it feels so removed from real life? On the other hand, the Renoir film makes us feel the relationship between fiction and life, meaning and chaos."

Without endorsing Thomson's overstatements (which are part of what makes The Whole Equation such a fun read), this sentence does illuminate a tension that I feel is probably echoed over and over again in my own thinking about film: the division that exists between the popular conception of the film epic and those films that are far more important; the epic explorations of intimate reality in human interaction, a.k.a the 'art films'. Last Saturday, this tension came to a head in a single, six-hour screening of Marco Giordana's exceptional film The Best of Youth .