Woody Allen

NEW YORK -- Woody Allen is replaying the last few seconds before he spilled a pitcher of milk on his new shoes. He moves the containers on the coffee server like a football coach trying to figure out how a quarterback option ended in a fumble. "The mistake was," he begins a recent interview, "I was reaching for this cup and ..." His voice trails off in a sigh and he adds, "This crepuscular light." Crepuscular: of, relating to, or resembling twilight. Allen rarely plumbs Merriam-Webster, but that sort of pratfall, one he says would be perfect in his movies, is occasion enough.

Woody Allen returns to his roots in "Sweet and Lowdown," a gentle comedy set in the Jazz Age that avoids the dyspepsia and hysterically pitched self-pity of his most recent movies and hearkens back to the tender, observant humor that made Allen such a beloved figure in the American cinema. Sean Penn plays Emmet Ray, a brilliant jazz guitarist (second only to Django Reinhardt) who supports himself as a pimp (he prefers the term "manager"), whose idea of a night out is shooting rats in the dump, and who has a self-destructive knack for getting himself fired just when he's hitting his stride.

"Woody Allen: A Biography," by John Baxter. Carroll & Graf. 492 pages. $27. Woody Allen, the most non-reclusive recluse in New York, presents a rumpled, diffident taunt to biographers. His official (and uncritical) story has already been written by Eric Lax; anyone else audacious enough to want to write about the writer-director's life is greeted by a non-communicative subject and an impenetrable bubble of paranoia from his friends and colleagues. So John Baxter, who has written biographies of Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, among others, is to be commended for trying to bring some balance to a record that heretofore has veered between the sycophancy of court reporters and the hostility of New York tabloids.

NEW YORK -- For four years, Woody Allen has been deeply estranged from his son with Mia Farrow. Father and son have not seen or spoken with each other.But the boy, whom Allen proudly named Satchel 11 years ago, has emerged as an extraordinarily gifted child -- a prodigy so smart that he is already attending college.Today, Satchel is known as Seamus Farrow, lives with his actress mother in Connecticut and is enrolled at Simon's Rock College, in Great Barrington, Mass., a small school for gifted high school students that is an annex of Bard College.

Now, it's time for the heavyweights.Oh sure, 1999 already has seen the return of a galaxy far, far away in "The Phantom Menace," Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman naked in "Eyes Wide Shut," some unlucky film students in "The Blair Witch Project" and films starring everyone from Michelle Pfeiffer to Bruce Willis.But now things get serious. Over the next four months, all manner of Hollywood royalty will be featured on screen, including Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Sean Penn and Winona Ryder.

Last week at a Queens, New York auction, fans of filmmaker Woody Allen acquired their own stardust memories. Hundreds of props from his many films were sold off because there was no more room for them in Allen's movie warehouse.Among the interiors and other treasures purchased were shoes from "Deconstructing Harry," mahogany radio consoles from "Radio Days" and a few gaudy sofas from "Bullets Over Broadway."Surprisingly, in a time when "Antiques Roadshow" yokels are told their Charo napkins are worth a mint, none of the cinema tchotchkes required astronomical bids.

What do actors, models, presidents, the pope, Elvis, Hollywood madams, plastic surgeons, ACLU lawyers, skinheads, teen-age obese acrobats, Joey Buttafuoco, Donald Trump, former CIA operatives, real estate agents, transvestites and Charles Manson have in common?They are all guaranteed their 15 minutes of fame in a post-Warhol world, and they all make an appearance in "Celebrity," Woody Allen's fitfully funny, elegantly rendered musing on American culture's curious relationship to fame."You can tell a lot about a society by whom it chooses to celebrate," one character says in this slight but often droll commentary on the voracious maw of post-modern media culture, which swallows everyone in its path regardless of merit or morals.

Woody Allen as an insect -- now there's a piece of casting that begs a few jokes.And that reliance on star power is where much of the problem lies with "Antz," a fitfully entertaining piece of animation from DreamWorks that shows off strengths that also manage to be weaknesses.Admittedly, using a roster of distinctive (and well-cast) voices for the film's six-legged creations gives the film marquee value. Besides Allen, there's Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Sylvester Stallone, Christopher Walken, Danny Glover, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin and Anne Bancroft.

Conventional wisdom used to have it that movie theaters weren't safe for adults until well after Labor Day, but the summer of 1998 gave the lie to such thinking.With fare like "The Truman Show," "Out of Sight" and "Saving Private Ryan" - not to mention the gross-out comedy "There's Something About Mary" for the inner 13-year-old boy in everyone - grown-ups had their share of diversions while the kids feasted on "Madeline," "Mulan" and "The Parent Trap."Still, a look ahead confirms the tradition of autumn as the back-to-basics movie season, with new films from such beloved veterans as John Frankenheimer, Woody Allen, Jonathan Demme, Ken Loach and Terrence Malick, not to mention young Turks like Todd Solondz, Gus Van Sant and Bryan Singer.

"Wild Man Blues," Barbara Kopple's documentary about Woody Allen's 1996 European tour with his Dixieland jazz band, is a fascinating film, not only for the truths it reveals but for the problems it presents.For one thing, "Wild Man Blues" is produced by Jean Doumanian, Allen's producer and good friend. Kopple has shown herself to be a highly principled filmmaker in such films as "Harlan County, U.S.A." and "American Dream," both about the contemporary American labor movement. But Doumanian's imprimatur raises troubling questions about control and objectivity.