Mayor of Rio offers to fully fund Woody Allen’s next movie if he shoots it there

With Rio De Janeiro hosting the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, the city is aggressively courting “major world city” status. They don’t seem anywhere near ready for it, but Brazilians are world leaders in not giving a f*ck. Their latest bold move comes straight from mayor Eduardo Paes, who told O Globo newspaper that the city would fully fund Woody Allen’s next movie if he shoots it in Rio. Hey, it worked for Twilight and 5ast 5urious. What’s Portuguese for “let’s not have another turgid discussion about categorical imperatives?”

“The Reacciona Artista (an actors’ union) will kill me when I pay Woody the millions he asks for, but I’m ready to pay 100 percent of the production costs,” the mayor said.

Three years ago, RioFilme, the city’s official film-promotion agency, reached the point of announcing an agreement with Allen to shoot a feature film in Rio de Janeiro along the lines of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” the movie the American made in the Spanish city in 2007, but in the end the idea went nowhere.

In recent years the director, who has never filmed in South America, moved his movie locations from his native New York to European cities like Barcelona and London, where he directed the trilogy made up of “Match Point,” “Scoop” and “Cassandra’s Dream.” [GlobalPost]

Match Point was originally set in the Hamptons, but Allen moved it to London and shot with a British crew when he struck a funding deal with BBC Films. Frankly, the switch showed in the stilted dialog, but it was one of the more plot-driven Woody Allen movies.

Rio seems a little gritty for your usual “bourgeois intellectuals experience lust and ennui” Woody Allen plot, but I’d love to see him try. Vicky Cristina Barcelona included a character, the Javier Bardem character’s father, who refused to publish any of his beautiful poems “to punish society  for its inability to love,” and I’d give anything to see that guy get kicked in the stomach until he puked, like the hippie in Elite Squad.

My favorite Brazilian Woody Allen movie is Rannah and Rer Sisters.

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