The Woody Allen machine chugs ever onwards, spluttering and mumbling through sunny foreign cities, chewing up attractive young actresses in recycled stories about love and lost love and the drama that unfolds therein. On that note, Emma Stone is the first high-profile name to be cast for next year’s Woody Allen film, shooting through the Summer of 2013 in Spain. It’s as of yet untitled, and the plot is not known, but a large ensemble cast is being assembled. Just how large is not yet known either, but suffice to say there will be an attractive young woman for every schlubby loser.
Stone is currently very much in demand, filming Birdman with Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of Babel, Biutiful, and some other films that don’t begin with B, but who cares about those. After Birdman she’ll tackle that aforementioned Woody Allen film, before filming with Cameron Crowe in an as-of-yet unknown project, which she will follow up with Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak. Her dance card is pretty packed for the next few years, but none of that matters when there’s so few young actress who can convincingly play vulnerable and sarcastic.
It’s a piece of stellar casting on behalf of Woody Allen; she might be able to lend some chemistry to yet another travelogue about how great it is for white, comfortably middle class Americans to travel to [insert foreign country] and experience the local culture in the immediate vicinity of [cultural landmark 1] and [cultural landmark 2], before getting a bite to eat and learning something about themselves and their relationship before a surprisingly steamy sex scene. Emma Stone will no doubt figure in that equation somewhere along the way.
The film’s release, if it properly follows the expected Allen film release cycle, is expected Summer 2014 – probably around July-ish – so start getting your hopes up. Maybe future historians will dispense with a numerical system of naming years and call them instead by the Woody Allen film that appeared that year – this year will be known as Blue Jasmine, last year will be To Rome With Love, 2011 will be known as Midnight in Paris, and on and on. Some years are better than others.
