I also rewatched
What's Up, Tiger Lily? and my response to it is about what I remembered. This kind of thing has never, ever been funny, whether it's the UCB redubbing
It's a Wonderful Life or Bad Lip Readings, silly dubs always end up leaning into non-sequitur nonsense due to the constraints of the format. This one opens with two huge belly-laugh lines
"Name three presidents" and "An Oriental!"
that give false hope for a bit, but boy this just keeps going and going and runs out of ideas fast. Funny that I'd forgotten it was in 'Scope, including the Allen-starring bits (which are by far the best thing here: loved his joke about how the Japanese film is full of lovely scenes of rape, especially after suffering through one too many Japanese films from this period), meaning everyone calling
Manhattan his first 'Scope film was off. But this is certainly an asterisk of a film. Speaking of asterisks, sorry folks, I love
Play It Again, Sam too and it'd make my list... but he didn't direct it. However, if ten users weigh in here or via PM telling me they think it should count, I'll allow it.
Also, back to
Tiger Lily-- last night while looking for reviews of the Allen book Narrator rec'd, I actually stumbled upon Rosenbaum's article where he praises the film and the whole thing is the best evidence yet to support my claim that he's just Liberal Armond White. It's a hit piece on Allen in which he argues Allen has no defining film style or consistency of vision-- in 1990! He bolsters
Jerry Lewis instead (who I also love, but who has nothing to do with Allen apart from Rosenbaum's fixation on their respective popularity in France), and he compares Allen repeatedly to
Mel Brooks. Now, there is literally nothing Brooks and Allen have in common other than their Jewishness, and when one reads Rosenbaum going into attacks on the New York intelligentsia and so on, it's hard to not read it as vaguely anti-Semitic at best. Rosenbaum additionally seems to think that the fact that Allen finds his films in the editing room means he's not a real creative visionary, which is... an opinion.