Image Credit: CBS
How will the Wolf Pack look after retirement? Probably something like the cast of Last Vegas, an upcoming comedy about a wild bachelor party thrown by group of old friends — accent on the old.
The film stars an impressive quartet who have garnered six Oscars and 14 nominations over their long, celebrated careers: Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Kline. Kline, the youngest of the group, is a sprightly 65; Freeman, the oldest, is 75. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Brian Hamill/MGM/PBS
The first thing to say about the two-part, 3-hour-and-15-minute American Masters special Woody Allen: A Documentary, which airs tonight and tomorrow on PBS, is that it mixes things you already know with things you didn’t know in an avidly enjoyable, Woody-nostalgia way. Here’s something, for instance, that I didn’t know: Allen still does all his writing on the same tiny typewriter he has owned since he was 16 — a German-made Olympia portable that he purchased for $40 in 1952. He’s written all his movies on it, all his plays, and all his New Yorker pieces. The typewriter is missing its top, so you can see those primitive reel-to-reel ink cartridges, but, according to Allen, it “still works like a tank.” Of course, this means that when he’s re-writing, he has to literally cut and paste pieces of paper together. But hey, his system ain’t broke, so why fix it? Looking at that small, boxy relic of a typewriter (it’s nestled on a desk amid the tasteful coziness of the writing room in his Upper East Side brownstone), and listening to Allen talk about it with such sheepish devotion, one can see how much of him it embodies: his obsession with the past — old movies, old music, old ways of being; his stubbornly skeptical view of technology; even, in a funny way, his fear of mortality, since the guy who sold the typewriter to the young Allen Konigsberg assured him that it would still be working after his death. READ FULL STORY »
