Woody Allen tires of the rest of the world, comes home for upcoming film, U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
In big news that wouldn't have been news eight years ago, Woody Allen’s next movie will be shot in America, mostly San Francisco and New York. Many people say Woody Allen is one of the most American of great filmmakers, and that his comedies say a lot about the state of contemporary life in the United States, but all those people are French, and would likely name Jerry Lewis as first runner-up. Allen is intensely associated with New York, but of the eight movies he's directed since 2005, four of them were made in London, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona and last year's Midnight In Paris were set right where the titles said they’d be. (His latest is To Rome With Love, which opens in Italian theaters next week, and in the U.S. in June.) Allen’s late-life cinematic overseas tour wasn’t entirely his idea. But his much-publicized deal with DreamWorks resulted in a straight four-film string of turkeys, after which he found it increasingly hard to get domestic funding. In Europe, meanwhile, he’s still a revered, exotic cultural object, and it’s an honor to have him shooting his latest tax write-off in a given nation’s tourist centers.