I'm sorry, I can't stand for trashtalking Stardust Memories / Crimes & Misdemeanors / Radio Days / Another Woman / Match Point / Manhattan here.

Stardust Memories in particular is 1) one of the most experimental, greatest films ever made and 2) the ending where Sandy Bates realizes much of his audience has missed the point of his film, but he is still satisfied because he created great art, cores in to the mind of good artists better than anything ever put to screen before. (See: Steve McQueen, a great living artist whose film 'Shame' was misunderstood as being just about sex addiction rather than loneliness, and '12 Years A Slave' just about slavery rather than power.)

The problem is further compounded that very few professional critics understand his films. I'm not evoking this in the vein of "you must have a very high IQ to understand Rick & Morty...", it's just simple things like how Manhattan is not sympathetic towards its pedophiliac lead, but relentlessly skewers him for his immature, abusive & narcissistic self and shows his best friends as uptight yuppies too self-absorbed to understand who he actually is.

Unfortunately, his films also attract That Type of Woody Allen fan (who also misunderstand Manhattan, typically) everyone loathes, which leads to people compounding the fan with the man and the man with the art. Shit, look at Crimes & Misdemeanors' final monologue, after the film's wealthy villain has his blackmailing mistress murdered, and tell me it ain't leftist!

And after the awful deed is done, he finds that he's plagued by deep-rooted guilt. Little sparks of his religious background, which he'd rejected, are suddenly stirred up. He hears his father's voice. He imagines that God is watching his every move. Suddenly, it's not an empty universe at all, but a just and moral one, and he's violated it. Now, he's panic-stricken. He's on the verge of a mental collapse, an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police.

And then one morning, he awakens. The sun is shining, his family is around him and mysteriously, the crisis has lifted. He takes his family on a vacation to Europe and as the months pass, he finds he's not punished. In fact, he prospers. The killing gets attributed to another person — a drifter who has a number of other murders to his credit, so I mean, what the hell? One more doesn't even matter. Now he's scott-free. His life is completely back to normal. Back to his protected world of wealth and privilege.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. I don't care for the man himself, but I gotta defend the great art.