Radio Days
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.72 You Save: $9.26 (62%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $5.69 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Radio Days
Movie Review: Minor masterpiece from Woody
Summary: 5 Stars
Radio Days depicts Woody Allen's love affair with the radio. Since I grew
up with the radio it was especially touching to me.
Movie Review: radio days
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the few videos that I can watch over and over. A must seeMovie Review: Finger Exercise
Summary: 4 Stars
This belongs to that group of Woody's films that seeks to recapture the golden years in Brooklyn, an area in the theatre covered by Neil Simon. Here Woody's unashamed of his sentimental love for bygone years in Brooklyn back at the family homestead, Jewish to the core, long before he became a sophisticated city boy living the life of Noel Coward or Truman Capote, the New York artist. The film is very well made, beautifully photographed. The Woody Allen stock company is here in form, an ensemble to be compared to Scorsese's well-cast character actors. Again, as in other nostalgic pieces, Woody seems to be exercising more than creating, preparing for bigger and better things. These are loving memories, handled well but not with great wit or perception, nothing quite like the superior later pieces that show the narrator more haunted by the past than in love with it. Mia Farrow seems poorly cast here, which is rare because she is wonderful in most everything she does. In this, however, Woody doesn't quite seem to see that she is not a bimbo type and can't pull it off. I don't believe for one second that Mia Farrow was ever a hat-check girl or a night club tart for the mob. She is a good actress but her talents don't include playing a dumb floozy. Diane Keaton, who means nothing to me as an actress, makes a brief appearance but shows more depth and concentration in her brief bit than all of Farrow's frequent appearances put together. Keaton looks like she belongs but is uncomfortable, while Farrow looks like she doesn't belong but is trying to be comfortable. Neither actress is especially sexy, although both are attractive. Woody directs the kids well; they are just bored and unhappy enough to be convincing; here, I think, we see, although it is never mentioned, how miserable the young Woody Allen must have felt being surrounded by such boring people and why he must have yearned to get out and move on in his life. Unlike Spielberg, for example, who always shows kids being happy to be young, Woody's boys are miserable and obviously can't stand the adults. This is altogether an unimpressive little piece, a mere exercise by the master as he focused his attention and moved on from nostalgia to bigger and better things.
Movie Review: When Radio Ruled the Waves
Summary: 4 Stars
I am a first generation child of the television age, although in recent years I have spent more time kicking and screaming about that fact than watching the damn thing. Nevertheless I can appreciate Director (and narrator) Woody Allen's valentine to the radio days of his youth. I am just old enough, although about a half generation behind Allen, to remember the strains of songs like Paper Dolls and Autumn Leaves that he grew up with and that are nicely interspersed throughout his story as backdrop floating in the background of my own house.
I am also a child of 'Rock and Roll' but those above-mentioned tunes were the melodies that my mother and father came of age to and the stuff of their dreams during World War II and its aftermath. The rough and tumble of my parents raising a bunch of kids might have taken the edge off it but the dreams remained. In the end it is this musical backdrop that makes Radio Days most memorable to me.
Let's be clear- there something very different between the medium of the radio and the medium of the television. As Allen's film poignantly points out the radio allowed for an expansion of the imagination (and of fantasy) that the increasingly harsh realities of what is portrayed on television do not allow one to get away with. There is, for example, the funny sketch here involving the `scare' caused by Orson Welles narration of War of the Worlds. Today the space wanderers would have to be literally in one's face before one accepted such a tale.
Allen's youth, during the heart of World War II, was time when one needed to be able to dream a little. The realities of the world at that time seemingly only allowed for nightmares. My feeling is that this film touched a lot of sentimental nerves for the World War II generation (that so-called `greatest generation') whether it was his Jewish families (as portrayed here) on the shores of New York's Far Rockaway or my Irish families on the shores of Quincy, Massachusetts. Nice work, Woody.
Movie Review: Woody Allen's own "Amarcord"
Summary: 4 Stars
Radio Days (1987)- written, directed, and narrated by Allen:
What a beautiful, kind, gentle, ironic, warm, sentimental (in a very good way and yes, I am talking about Woody Allen's movie, that's right) yet perfectly balanced delight. It is a series of sketches about young Joe (young Allen, of course, played by Seth Green - that was a surprise), an adolescent in Brooklyn, NY during 1930s-1940s who he was passionately in love with radio which was a king. The film is a tribute to the magical radio days and the myths and legends about radio personalities, the memory of a grown man who never forgot where he came from, the love letter to his always fighting and arguing ("I mean, how many people argue over oceans?") but loving relatives and a very funny comedy (the way only Allen's comedy can be). It is the film where pretty like a doll and painfully naive Sally (Mia Farrow) asks who Pearl Harbor is? Where gorgeous Diane Keaton sings and Diane Wiest, his beloved Aunt Bea never gives up hope of one true love. He never told us if she found it...
"I never forgot that New Year's Eve when Aunt Bea awakened me to watch 1944 come in. I've never forgotten any of those people or any of the voices we would hear on the radio. Though the truth is, with the passing of each New Year's Eve, those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer."
The Radio days are gone but thanks to Allen, the voices of the times passed are still clear and sound and they always will be.
4.5/5