Woody Allen Refuses to Quit: Blame Europe

America may have spawned Woody Allen, but “the perpetuation of Allen's zombie-like career is one atrocity for which we refuse to be held accountable,” Joe Queenan argues in the Guardian. The diminutive director’s recent films have bombed stateside; when eight people showed up for a New York screening of Hollywood Ending, Queenan writes, it signaled that “Allen was finished as a driving force in US cinema.”

So Allen transplanted his neurotic shtick to London, where he made three consecutive stinkers, including Match Point, a sycophantic ode to moneyed WASPs. And because Europeans inexplicably continue bankrolling Allen’s projects and filling theaters, his crew descended on Spain next. The resulting Vicky Cristina Barcelona just moves him closer to "that cataleptic Eric Claptonesque state where an artist is revered as a god, but not by anyone who originally worshiped in his church." (More Woody Allen stories.)