MUST SEE TV: MEETING WA

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Tom Sutpen has one of the most fascinating blogs around with If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, and this weekend’s must-see TV comes directly from this great site. It’s a 26-minute film entitled Meetin’ WA, the chronicle of a conversation between Jean-Luc Godard and Woody Allen. Here’s Tom:

”At once sublime and witty, the 26 minutes of Meetin' WA consist of an interview Jean-Luc Godard conducted in 1986 with Woody Allen, the director of What's Up, Tigerlily and Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (and soon to be featured in the final moments of Godard's abortive Cannon Pictures' King Lear). The chat itself is amiable enough; certainly avoiding any conceivable adversarial notes; but this, along with the New York setting (giving Allen the home field advantage as it were) does nothing to prevent a visible anxiety from growing on the part of the filmmaker as the interview goes on.

It's as if it dawned on Allen, right in the middle of everything, that this tape could be . . . used . . . in some way he would not be able to control, that he was talking to a man who long ago demonstrated that he would never be bound to a standard not his own.”

(Thanks to David Hudson and GreenCine Daily for the tip.)