Woody Allen is a heavenly get for Bill Maher and Club Random. Obviously.
Woody Allen on the “capsule meaning” ofThe Purple Rose of Cairo (starting at 25:30):
“We are all, in my opinion, forced to choose between reality and fantasy. And it’s very pleasurable to choose fantasy. But that way, in the end, lies madness. So you have to choose reality, and reality always kills you. It always hurts you. but you have no choice. You can’t choose fantasy because you’ll go nuts [if you do]. So you have to choose real, and real is always heartbreaking because life is heartbreaking.”
2nd best observation, Maher quoting Allen (33:20): “The line that I loved was, uh, I think about about one of your early dates, and you said ‘I was so exhausted when I got home…so exhausted from being charming. I felt like I’d run a marathon’.
Allen: “But I would not want to give the impression that I was some kind of ladies man who scored all the time. Most of the time I struck out. I succeeded only a few times.”
Allen is too refined and discreet to use HE’s baseball analogy, but what he’s basically saying is that he probably batted around .400. (Okay, maybe .350.) The engulfing tragedy of 2025 and the generally disparaging view of intellectually limited or non-adventurous men among feminist-minded, #MeToo-influenced women is that so many average guys — the ones who aren’t flush, I mean, and are living marginally or modestly with a vaguely shitty car and perhaps an atrocious dress sense — a majority don’t even get lucky one time out of 100, if that.
Scott Galloway calls them “a generation of young men filled with rage and shame.”
A cheap, callous, antagonistic post from the Variety scumbags. Just a casual joke on Woody’s part, and they’re suggesting that he’s somehow on the team:
