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The Ballad of Greenwich Village

Perfunctory and pointless doc, but some celebs are interesting

By GERALD PEARY | March 22, 2006

2.0 Stars

DREAMS OF GETTING LAID: Mailer reminisces about the old days.

Filmmaker Karen Kramer’s best work on The Ballad of Greenwich Village was during production, getting Norman Mailer, Maya Angelou, Richie Havens, and the ever-reticent Woody Allen to reminisce before her camera. It’s fun to hear how Allen and fellow comedian Bill Cosby used to hang out together on Village streets in the early ’60s, between sets. And how Mailer at 16 would head into the Village from Brooklyn with wild dreams of, in his words, “getting laid.” But the street cinematography is perfunctory, and the bulk of this documentary is disorganized and pointless, jumping too quickly through 150 years of New York cultural history (there’s a Lili Taylor voiceover) to have any impact. And not all the interviews are effective ones, i.e., smug celeb Tim Robbins sitting on a stoop complaining about rich yuppies taking over in the 1980s.

Related: Wrestle in peace, Armies of the light, Straight outta Kafka, More

Wrestle in peace
In a life of many garlands and much renown, it was Mailer’s strange engagement with literary destiny always to be trapped on the wrong side of his art.
Armies of the light
Maybe the trauma of another intractable war has sparked the movies’ recent interest in ’60s headliners.
Straight outta Kafka
We want to get into the shower and not emerge until November 2008.
The sound and the Führer
Having taken on such larger-than-life figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, Pablo Picasso, Jesus Christ, and, of course, Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer now essays “the most mysterious human being of the century,” Adolf Hitler.
War stories
“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago , you can’t help but feel a chill.
Norman Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ gets the treatment
Long before suburban kids began digging Dr. Dre and Tupac, an earlier generation of young white people venerated the jazz and swing music of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.
Eat, pray, shove
So after all the roarings and the thumpings and the garlands and the scandals, after all the sex and the jazz and the fires on the moon and the women’s-libbers howling for his blood and the glass bouncing off Gore Vidal’s head, the old lion ends his days in comfortable domesticity on the crooked fingertip of Cape Cod, nibbling teriyaki-infused oatmeal and reading baseball statistics on the crapper.
No Spain, no gain
Many are hailing Woody Allen’s new film, claiming it to be a “return to form.” I agree: he’s returned to the earliest form of his career, the monologue.
Puccini For Beginners
More like Woody Allen for beginners.
Very civilized
Woody Allen has said that Scarlett Johansson, like Diane Keaton, was “just hit with a talent stick and has it all.” No scoop: just another entertaining Woody Allen film. By Gary Susman
No scoop
Prolific as he is, Woody Allen doesn’t really make new movies anymore, he just recombines parts of his previous brainchildren. Watch the trailer for Scoop (QuickTime) Very civilized: The director everyone loves to act for. By Gary Susman
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Topics: Reviews , Celebrity News, Entertainment, Bill Cosby, More

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