The Front (1976)

The Front is a Woody Allen movie that wasn't written and directed by Woody Allen – in fact, this film predates Allen's big smashes with Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) – but it's still Allen at the film's center, and the jokes feel very Allen throughout.

The Front is very, very good. It's funny for the first two acts, and then it turns serious. And Martin Ritt has directed it so well that the serious turn made perfect sense and didn't feel the least disruptive. The movie stays serious after that – it is a film about the blacklist, after all, but the screenplay is aces and Ritt's direction is excellent. Michael Murphy is great in a supporting role, but Zero Mostel is incredible. He's so perfect in this. And when, as the credits start to roll, each name says when he was blacklisted in the early 1950s, it brought tears to my eyes. The Front has a powerful ending, and if this romantic comedy stays lighthearted, it always takes its main topic seriously.

Two from Alain Resnais

I recently watched two very different films by Alain Resnais (who made the very, very serious films La Guerre Est Fine, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Last Year at Marienbad in the late 1950s and early '60s). The 1980 film and the 1998 film were downright quirky, and they've cemented for me just how experimental and interesting a filmmaker Resnais actually is.

Last week the unseen movie club chose Same Old Song (On Connait la Chanson) as our film. It is odd and charming and actually sort of wonderful. This movie involves a bunch of characters who lipsync to older pop songs as a part of their dialogue, which (as it happens) is mostly about depression and love and loss. The characters look for love and fight with their spouses and then burst into song, but it isn't their voices we hear at all but those of Josephine Baker and Charles Aznavour and other older singers. It's pretty strange and totally fun.

On Connait la Chanson was released in 1998 in France (1999 in the U.S.), two years after Woody Allen made Everyone Says I Love You, in which the characters actually sing the older torch songs – and in Paris, no less. On Connait la Chanson is not a romanticized version of love, though, and doesn't have the Woody Allen fantasy veneer over it. Resnais's film is a film about depression, and it's interesting and weird.

And then a couple days ago I saw that Mon Oncle d'Amérique was on the Criterion Channel, so I decided to watch that film too. This film stars Nicole Garcia, Gerard Depardieu, and Roger-Pierre, and it is a very strange movie. It follows these three characters and then also a scientist who is telling us about human behavior and social psychology. It's an odd choice. There are a lot of mice who learn particular behaviors... and then there are humans in mouse costumes re-enacting their behaviors. It's super interesting and very strange.

Mon Oncle d'Amérique is, however, marred by an unfortunate casting situation: I suppose it is awful to say, but I found Roger-Pierre's character unlikable mostly because I didn't believe him to be attractive enough to inspire the absolute drama he inspires in this movie as Nicole Garcia and Nelly Borgeaud fight over him.

Overall, though, I found this movie troubling. I don't think I emotionally identified with any of the characters, but the movie is so strange that it really did get under my skin.

Nostalgia for Old Glamor

Hollywood loves itself, and movies about old Hollywood seem to arrive on the scene every year. Last year we had the abysmal Trumbo, but not so long ago, we had The Artist, which was delightful and went on to win Best Picture. And, incidentally, I really liked Hail, Caesar!, this year's Coen Brothers spectacle. This year's winner will be about Hollywood, too, (I'm talking about La La Land, obviously), but it will be a different kind of nostalgia trip that three movies I'm reporting on today were.

First, a movie that is already on DVD, Woody Allen's Café Society. Is this movie about café society in New York? I guess it is. But more importantly this movie is just bad. Jesse Eisenberg plays a young Jewish kid and neurotic Woody Allen surrogate, who falls in love with a woman he can't have. Fine. That part of the film is actually sort of interesting.

The really bad part is Steve Carrell as his movie-mogul uncle. The film is filled with name-dropping absurdities. Carrell informs us that "I'm expecting a call from Ginger Rogers" or some other nondescript idiocy. There are no actors in Kate Hepburn or Hedda Hopper drag, and actually I can't believe that I am about to say this, but I think the film could've been improved by that camp gesture that usually so annoys me. I say this because without actors in drag as famous people, Café Society feels like a hermetically sealed Woody Allen universe that has no attachment to reality in any way. I never for one moment believed Steve Carrell was a movie executive, I never believed he had lunch with Errol Flynn, and I never, for that matter, even believed he lived in Los Angeles.

As I've said before about this period of Woody Allen's career, I feel like Allen can still write a movie – the premise and ending of Café Society are intriguing – but he no longer knows how to direct one (cf. Magic in the Moonlight, Blue Jasmine, To Rome with Love). Café Society feels phony in the extreme, filled with caricatures on movie sets doing things that real people never do and saying words that sound like bad readings of a Woody Allen screenplay. I still feel an attachment to Allen's universes, and that's why I saw this, but if you care about yourself, you will skip this film.

* * *

And then there is Rules Don't Apply, the first film by the great Warren Beatty since 1998's Bulworth. (Honestly, how is that possible???). This is actually a fairly charming little movie, although it does wear out its welcome after awhile.

Ms. Collins and Mr. Ehrenreich

Beatty has said that Rules Don't Apply is not a film about Howard Hughes, but is instead a movie about two young people who get caught up in Hughes's world. The two have been damaged by Christianity so much that they feel like they can't love one another even though they do. All of this is true. the film is about that, but Rules Don't Apply has Howard Hughes in it, and Hughes is too large a character for the film to be about anything else. Rules becomes about Howard's strange peccadilloes, even if it wants to be an old-fashioned love story about two kids overcoming silly Christian mores. 

The storytelling here is charming, though. Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Beatty himself, Annette Bening, Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, and the other (numerous) actors who appear in the film are all absolutely delightful. And the whole thing has a delightful whimsy that didn't wear thin for me, even though the Rules as a whole feels fairly shallow. 

Perhaps most disappointing about Rules is that it isn't going to get any Oscar nominations. Or... well, actually, I actually think the song "The Rules Don't Apply" actually deserves a nomination, and may garner the film its only one. It's just not a deep enough movie, glamorous and cute as it was.

* * *

Last but certainly not least is Jackie from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who has had three movies released in the U.S. in 2016 (The Club was earlier in the year and Neruda is in theatres now). 

Jackie is an intense character study of Jacqueline Kennedy from just before the president is shot and killed to the end of his funeral procession. The form of the film is odd, though, and this is most clearly marked by Mica Levi's dissonant horror-film score, which either makes or breaks the film, depending on your perspective. But Jackie is not Jackie without this score. Levi's music is overwhelming, insistent, and always troubling. As Jackie interacts with Robert Kennedy, with Rose Kennedy, with Jack Valenti, with Lyndon Johnson, one has a constant sense of disturbance, disruption, even terror. It's a very jarring effect.

I thought Jackie was a weird movie. I rather appreciated what it was trying to do, but I can't say that I enjoyed it. I liked its version of character study – one that takes stock of a person in crisis and then makes judgments about her based on the decisions she made during this very difficult time. Jackie has a great deal of affection for its central figure, but is also deeply suspicious of her, sees her as fundamentally flawed, ambitious, vindictive, perhaps even shallow. This makes the whole thing complicated and interesting, certainly, but... well it just isn't all that pleasurable. I found myself growing impatient with Mrs. Kennedy, with her tics and her wealth and her pretensions ("I don't smoke", she tells a reporter, though she has been chainsmoking throughout the entire film).

Jackie is going to get a single Oscar nomination for Natalie Portman (and maybe could net one more for Costume Design), but I can't see this picture connecting with audiences in a big way.

In fairness to Larraín's movie, I will say that my central thought while watching the pageantry of Jack Kennedy's funeral was about how classy it all was. Say what you want about Jackie Kennedy, she had class. How far we have fallen! We are about to install the most vulgar, classless president in American history into the White House, and the new First Lady won't even be moving into the house where Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr. lived. It is very hard not to think about President-Elect Trump while watching Jackie, and it may be that, finally, that makes the movie difficult to watch.

More movies to come! I'm seeing lots of them.

Magic in the Moonlight

Well, this is three Woody Allen pictures in a row that I didn't like. I don't really know what to do about it. I'm going to keep seeing them when they come out, obviously, but I think the old Woody Allen magic is mostly gone.

It is more complicated than that. The script for Magic in the Moonlight is actually ok. It's clever and quite funny with a central puzzle that I didn't actually figure out until the film's end. Colin Firth doesn't have any chemistry with his co-star Emma Stone, but he is funny enough as the central Woody character, neurotic and depressive and misanthropic, and the rest of the film's actors are delightful, particularly Hamish Linklater as an absurd, besotted multimillionaire and Eileen Atkins as Firth's wise aunt.

But the exposition is clunky. And the filmmaking (like Blue Jasmine's) is amateurish. Awkward shot/reverse-shot cuts, strange non sequitur sequences that should've been edited out, stilted transitions, two-dimensional characters, lazy scripting.

There is a fabulous sequence with Eileen Atkins – truly great in the film's best performance – where she tricks Colin Firth near the film's end. The writing sparkles and Atkins shines. This scene comes near the movie's end, so the overall impression with which one leaves is pleasant and delightful (the geriatric audience with which I saw the movie actually applauded), but for me it was way too little too late.

This is where I am with Woody Allen, I think. His ideas are good. The jokes are still quite funny. But putting it all together just doesn't work anymore. Someone else should be filming his scripts. I'm afraid he's lost his touch.

Earlier Allen:

2013 - Blue Jasmine

2012 - To Rome with Love

2011 - Midnight in Paris 

2008 - Vicky Christina Barcelona

2008 - Cassandra's Dream

2006 - Scoop

2005 - Melinda and Melinda

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 4 of 14

Blue Jasmine

3 Nominations

• Actress: Cate Blanchett (I'm Not There., Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Notes on a Scandal, The Aviator, Elizabeth)
• Original Screenplay: Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris, Match Point, Deconstructing Harry, Mighty Aphrodite, Bullets over Broadway, Husbands and Wives, Alice, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Radio Days, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, Manhattan, Interiors, Annie Hall)
• Supporting Actress: Sally Hawkins

Director: Allen

Cast: Blanchett, Bobby Cannavale, Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, Andrew Dice Clay, Michael Stuhlbarg, Peter Sarsgaard, Louis C.K., Max Casella

I sort of hated this, and I fail to understand how this managed a Best Original Screenplay nomination, especially in a year that was more crowded in Original than it was in Adapted (it is usually the other way around). Allen, by the way, is the most nominated screenwriter of all time with 15 nominations and 3 wins. Billy Wilder is the next runner up, with 12 nominations and 3 wins. On the Supporting Actress front, I am really happy for Sally Hawkins. Her nomination was sort of a surprise (she took Oprah's spot!) but she has been doing solid work in Hollywood since her breakthrough in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, and she deserves this. Blanchett has the Oscar in the bag, and, again, this is well deserved. She is superb in Blue Jasmine (no matter how bad I think the film itself is) and she has never won, despite being excellent in absolutely every movie in which she has appeared. [Actually, I will make one exception to this: that Good German mess.]
Will Win: Actress

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #66 out of 75

The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug

3 Nominations

• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing
• Visual Effects

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Benedict Cumberbatch, Aidan Turner, Dean O'Gorman, Ken Stott, Graham McTavish, William Kircher, James Nesbitt, Stephen Hunter, John Callen, Stephen Fry, Sylvester McCoy

This is an epic mess, filled (as all its predecessors have been) with sweeping vistas, long crossings over very thin bridges, rather a lot of bad dialogue, and an always present sense of foreboding and doom. This particular film is also about running. It is the second in a planned trilogy and ends with a cliffhanger. The most recent film in The Hobbit series also received three Oscar nominations – Makeup, Production Design, and Visual Effects – this second one exchanges Makeup and Production Design for Sound Mixing and Sound Editing primarily because of the increased amount of swordfighting, running, and dragons slithering over mountains of golden treasure. But, look: the magic, if not the money, has gone out of Jackson's Middle Earth franchise. The Lord of the Rings trilogy garnered a whopping 30 nominations and 17 Oscar statuettes. All of those films were nominated for Best Picture. If the Academy has enough good will that it feels as though it needs to nominate this franchise, it certainly does not have enough good will to vote for it to win – certainly not over Gravity, which should best this film in all of its categories.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #55 out of 75

August: Osage County

2 Nominations

• Actress: Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady, Julie & Julia, Doubt, The Devil Wears Prada, Adaptation., Music of the Heart, One True Thing, The Bridges of Madison County, Postcards from the Edge, A Cry in the Dark, Ironweed, Out of Africa, Silkwood, Sophie's Choice, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Deer Hunter)
• Supporting Actress: Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich, Pretty Woman, Steel Magnolias)

Director: John Wells

Cast: Roberts, Streep, Julianne Nicholson, Ewan McGregor, Margo Martindale, Juliette Lewis, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin, Dermot Mulroney, Benedict Cumberbatch, Misty Upham, Sam Shepard


Meryl Streep again, huh? I guess I'm the only one who is surprised that this film got talked about as much as it did. It was a big Tony-award-winning play that was heralded as the most important USAmerican play in a decade or whatever, but Tracy Letts' adaptation misses the mark. It's strangely stagey in places it doesn't need to be, and Letts refuses to cut the dialogue he loves so much (he had a similar problem with the John-Wells-directed Killer Joe). If the director was confused about what to do with this film, the marketing people appeared similarly puzzled. The trailer for August made it look like a delightful comedy à la Albert Brooks, and those posters! One was a house with roof coming off of it in some sort of hinge motion and the other was Julia Roberts beating Meryl Streep into the floor. In truth, this movie was not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. The acting is top-notch across the board, and Streep and Roberts are both deserving. But this needed to be made into a film instead of simply filming a play. And let's just be honest and ask ourselves if Julia Roberts played a supporting character or gives a supporting performance in this. Really? How do these things happen. In any case, both of these women have Oscars. (Streep has three.) Neither will be winning another on March 2.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #52 out of 75

A Conversation about Nebraska

Because my friend Brian always posts pictures on Instagram and Twitter of all the movies he's seeing, I knew he had recently seen Nebraska. And because I love any excuse to talk to Brian about movies, I asked him to chat with me about Nebraska and hopefully be nicer/smarter about the movie than I am. Here we are:

Aaron: I thought the movie was pretty funny. Lots of comical stuff that I rather enjoyed. But, like most of Payne's movies, I thought it was sort of smug. It's funny watching this guy pathetically beg his girlfriend to move back in, and it's funny watching this woman harass this old man, and it's funny laughing at these brothers who have nothing to say to one another except to sit around and ask about cars that broke down in 1974. But, I get the feeling while I'm laughing at these situations that I'm laughing at how stupid these people are. Or rather at how much smarter I am than they are. Now, this may just be me – and maybe this says more about my own elevated sense of self-worth or something like that – but I felt like Nebraska just outright made fun of these people. The jokes are at their expense, as though Payne is just a bully poking fun at people who deserve just a little more kindness.

The other thing I want to say is that the movie is a good movie. I saw Nebraska in the same week as I saw Saving Mr. Banks and The Desolation of Smaug, and Nebraska is so much more skillfully made than the other two pictures. It is, in fact, expertly done. But it sort of left me hollow afterward. It hit all the notes it was supposed to hit, but I simply didn't connect with it very deeply. (This is, I think, how a lot of people felt about Haneke's The White Ribbon, to stick with black-and-white pictures.)

Brian: There's one tiny moment in the film that I keep thinking of – one which captures everything I liked about Nebraska.

We've been Woody's hometown for some time now, and we find ourselves again in the tv room at Ray and Martha's. The boys are in their spots, and Uncle Ray's in his. But it's the first time we see Aunt Martha joining them. Martha's sitting next to Ray but, rather than facing the tv, she's positioned to face the profiles of her two sons. See, the oversize sectional is way too big for the room, so they've horned the love seat section into the corner leaving just enough room for Aunt Martha's legs in the gap between. It'd clearly be a fuss for her to get up and out of her seat so, as is her way, Aunt Martha (as played with crystalline clarity by stage vet Mary Louise Wilson) just beams with delight to whoever wanders into the room as she hollers her enthusiastic chit-chattery over the blare of whatever rerun she and her men are watching.
 

Rance Howard and Mary Louise Wilson are just left of center in the frame.

The redolent layering of precise detail in this tiny moment captivates me and makes me somewhat inclined to defend Payne against claims of smugness. I like the vertiginous intimacy in Payne's work here. Payne forces us to stare long enough for the gaze to double back, in a way. I do remember laughing (fairly frequently) but not at many jokes at anybody's expense. What I mostly remember (aside from a few shocked guffaws) were abject giggles, mostly from my own embarrassment at my own reactions. In the end, I guess I liked how Payne's directorial hand forced me to notice not only the details of each tightly composed scene but also my own moment-to-moment discomfort in staring.

This queasiness might be why, when reflecting on the black and white cinematography, I found myself thinking not of Manhattan but of Night of the Living Dead.

Aaron: I love what you are saying about the specifics in the scene with Aunt Martha and everyone else watching The Golden Girls. This is when Nebraska is at its best: careful detail and intimate character study.

I think the reason I liked The Descendants so much was that I really felt that Payne cared for the characters in a way that didn't come through for me in Nebraska (or, indeed, in About Schmidt or Sideways). In Nebraska I felt distanced from the characters, even Will Forte, with whom I think the film sympathizes a lot. I saw the film as always just a little above that character, mocking him ever so slightly. I think the genuine warmth in The Descendants probably came from Nat Faxon and Jim Rash. This isn't to say that I didn't laugh a lot in Nebraska. I did. I just felt a little gross afterward. This is probably exactly what you're talking about.

But I love this Night of the Living Dead comparison. Tell me what you mean. Did you feel haunted by Hawthorne, NE?

Brian: Not so much the haunting. More the abject, looming threat of morbidity. (Death's coming for ya, kiddo, and – blecch – it's nasty even in black&white and, yeah, there's no escaping it! Even in static longshots.) Nebraska captures the weird creepiness of returning to your hometown and lacquers onto that discombobulation the horror of seeing the fact of your parents (and, by extension, yourself) becoming old. I think that's why I keep going back to the metaphors of vertigo and queasiness. They evoke Will Forte's (and by extension the film's) guiding disequilibrium. Forte's David loves his father; he loathes his father. David is mortified by this corpse of a small town; he is fascinated by the clues this town might hold for the mysteries of his own life. He wants to be closer to his father; he is repulsed and repelled by his father. He remains his father's child even as he becomes his father's caregiver. Not unlike Woody's lucidity, the film moves abruptly in and out, with a vertiginous swoop. For me, the black and white permitted Nebraska to amplify the uneasy moral ambivalences that I've found so intriguing in Payne's previous films by placing them in starker and more vulnerable relief.

Mr. Odenkirk, Mr. Dern, Mr. Forte, and Ms. Squibb – a polite family drive

Aaron: The acting is great. I loved Will Forte and Bob Odenkirk, especially. But I can't get Bruce Dern out of my head either, and the movie has sort of stuck with me.

Brian: I sorta think the acting (while excellent and masterful and all that) was a bit off. Especially Dern.

Aaron: What do you mean the acting was off? How is it excellent and masterful and also off? Does that mean your favorite performance in the film was Stacy Keach's? Haha.

Brian: Oh. Ack. Stacy Keach. No. I don't even want to talk about that. No, I think the performances I liked best were Rance Howard and Mary Louise Wilson as Uncle Ray and Aunt Martha. Both for their simplicity and precision, but especially for the way their performances bridged the stylistic gap that separated the principals from the bit players in this film world. The principal beef I've always had with Payne hasn't been his by-the-book screenplaying but his seeming disinterest in having his excellent actors find a shared style. Going all the way back to Citizen Ruth, Laura Dern, Swoosie Kurtz and Burt Reynolds are all great, but they're just not in the same movie stylistically. And I feel I could make that same claim for every Payne movie I've seen since. Payne clearly loves actors, which is great but, unlike other actor-loving directors (like, say, Woody Allen or Mike White or Almodóvar or the Coens), Payne seems a bit overdazzled by these actor creatures, which ends up stymying him in key ways.

I do think Bruce Dern delivers an excellent portrait of a difficult and complicated man experiencing a precipitous cognitive decline. But I'm not sure he was always playing Woody. I mean, I saw Dern  – vividly, palpably – but I don't know if I ever saw Woody. Likewise, I delighted in June Squibb's brusquely comedic depiction of this terrifyingly tiny tyrant. But I didn't buy it for a second that she was his wife or their mother. Or that she used to be a hairdresser. (Indeed, Squibb plays a version this mini-gorgon much more plausibly and to much greater effect in a recent arc on the HBO comedy series Getting On.) Even so, I still say Squibb and Dern each delivered masterful performances but it was the director's job to make sure their characterizations illuminated the story, and I'm not sure Payne held up his end of the bargain there.

Aaron: Ooo yeah. OK. I see all of that. I think the reason I love Odenkirk's and Forte's performances is that they felt like they were really doing things. Really watching each other, really seeing the things you're talking about vis-à-via mortality and son-hood. There's something about Squibb that I found sort of grandstanding, I guess. I mean, she is funny, but she somehow doesn't seem human. This is a part of what I mean by the director not really loving his characters. She is a henpecking old harridan, but I feel like it would've been nice to be able to love her a little bit. I just never felt like I could. Even when she is sort of badass and powerful – when she tells the one sister to go fuck herself and all of that. She doesn't ever feel like a real person to me, only a cartoon version of a person. She's not rudely sketched, but she's caricatured all the same.

The two sons are so much simpler. They had more opportunity for honesty, I guess. (I really did love Dern, though, even if I think you're right about the actors not being a part of the same movie.)

I love reading your thoughts about things like this. You make me smarter. You want to close us out?

Brian: Thanks for the invitation to gab. And, yeah, Call me JanEEce.

Enough Said and Moments of Realism

I really loved Enough Said.

My friend George and I have been talking recently about reality (or maybe realism?) in films. There is, often, very little of it. My friend and I were speaking about The Way Way Back and The Spectacular Now, mostly unsure about how to talk about how we thought the films got to something that seemed real in some kind of way. These things are difficult to pinpoint. Films tend to be glossy and heavily scripted, and they almost always star an actor or actress that I know at least from reputation. I buy into the movies, usually, and I don't worry too much about whether or not the movie is real. Whether or not it is real doesn't matter to me, actually, because it's a movie and I am watching it for reasons other than realism. Art, incidentally, (and this should be rather obvious) doesn't need to be real to address something powerful or meaningful.

Enough Said's plot reads to me as obviously constructed. It's a romantic comedy, and it works exactly like a standard romantic comedy ought to work. Girl meets boy, girl and boy get along for a while, girl and boy have a break-up, and then either girl and boy get back together at the end or girl finds someone new. Enough Said doesn't mess with this mold at all, but that doesn't stop it from having some amazingly real moments.

This is a romantic comedy about people in their forties. The romance is difficult because dating at that age comes with a lot of baggage. The jokes are funny because they understand something about the banality of getting old, the frustration of dealing with high-school-age kids, the panic of trying to find "the one" again. All of these things approach a kind of realness of situation, or the way life really works.

But the most real thing in this movie is the relationship at its center. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini have the most amazing chemistry. They are both so funny and perfect together, and their first kiss is so amazingly real and honest that my laughter moved from laughing at the situation to the kind of shocked laughter that comes when you can't believe that something is happening. These performances are some of the best of the year. For me, this is great acting: no histrionics; no big fight scenes; no rivers of tears; just simple behavior, the realness of everyday.

When Nicole Holofcener's Friends with Money (which I liked very much) came out, Kenneth Turan called her the Jane Austen of Los Angeles, a title I love and one that fits perfectly (except that I like Holofcener a lot more than I ever liked Jane Austen). But Enough Said works instead like a kind of feminist Angeleno, Woody Allen comedy. In fact, this movie combines the Austenian qualities – the keen observation of the daily lives of middle-class white folks, the difficulties of relationships – with Woody Allen at his best – good jokes, great relationships, broad farce – but focuses on a middle-aged woman from Los Angeles trying to find love again while her daughter leaves for college. This is lovable stuff and very funny.

Frances Ha(!) and How I'm Still a Mess

Finally had the chance to check out Noah Baumbach's latest picture Frances Ha and it is charming.

Frances follows a woman in her mid-twenties who lives in Brooklyn but doesn't have / can't quite afford an apartment. There is more to her than this: she wants to be a professional dancer, appears to be terrible at relationships with men, reserves her most sincere attachment for her best (female) friend, and tends to be a sloppy drunk (like most of us).

I identified with her a lot. Frances is a total mess, and she seems sort of clueless about her own position in life and her own choices. It would be easy to look at Frances and feel that we are smarter/cleverer/more together than she is. But I couldn't do that. As much of a mess as Frances is – clueless about her relationships with men, clueless about her friendships with women, ignorant about her artistic abilities – I know I have been Frances at several points in my life. I looked at my roommate at one point during the movie and said I feel like her.

No way, he said. But even if most of the time I can feel as though I have my life together, or feel as though I can confidently talk about who my friends are and how close we are and whom I can depend on thoroughly and where my career is headed, I also constantly feel as though I am hurtling headlong toward nothing, as though I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing or what I'm going to do next.

What's great about Frances is that she runs wherever she's going, spinning her way down the streets of New York at breakneck pace.

The film also refuses to be a romantic comedy. Actively refuses. And I appreciated that.

Frances Ha is my favorite of Baumbach's movies. Baumbach is obviously obsessed with the 1970s, and with Frances he captures our current hipster culture in the film-style of Woody Allen's Manhattan, black-and-white film and all. It's a lovely homage that makes perfect sense. The film is also very funny – frustrating, of course, and messy, and she makes such stupid decisions! – but as much as I laughed at Frances, I found myself directing my laughter inward. I have probably done most of the stupid things she does. Frances Ha is on Netflix Instant at the moment, and it's only about 90 minutes. Believe me, it's worth your time.

LOTS of Drinking: Part One

I thought Cate Blanchett was really stellar in Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's annual film.
After he made Midnight in Paris a couple years ago, people praised him: Woody's back! But that isn't really how Woody Allen works. He's not "back." Midnight was just one of the really good ones.

The famous shot from Interiors

As I am sure you are well aware, ever since Allen made Annie Hall in 1977, he has made an average of one film every year, directing (and often starring in) the current one while writing the next one. Some are great, some are less than great.

But even during the days of Annie Hall ('77) and Manhattan ('79), he made Interiors ('78) and Stardust Memories ('80), very difficult – even depressing – movies which most people had no idea what to do with. And Allen capped off the great streak of Zelig ('83), Broadway Danny Rose ('84), The Purple Rose of Cairo ('85), Hannah and Her Sisters ('86), and Radio Days ('87) by making September ('87) and Another Woman ('88). Ever heard of 'em?

That's probably too much intro to telling you that even though Allen is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers and a director whose films I always consider essential viewing, I did not care for Blue Jasmine (and, for the record, didn't care for his last picture, To Rome with Love, much either).

Jasmine is the story of a rich white socialite who loses all of her money because her scheming businessman-thief of a husband got arrested by the FBI and went to prison. Jasmine has started drinking very heavily (she is at least slightly tipsy in nearly every shot) and uncontrollably talking out loud to herself in public like a crazy person. Because this woman has actually begun to lose her mind.

The whole thing is funny, of course, but it isn't quite played for laughs. Instead, Blanchett plays this woman as a hot, drunk mess and her work is extraordinary. She's so good, in fact, that I almost started to feel sorry for her character at times.

I loved most of the other actors, too: there are a lot of them. Louis C.K. is great as a sound engineer who starts dating Blanchett's sister, played by Sally Hawkins. And I love Bobby Cannavale, Max Casella, and Andrew Dice Clay as the working-class guys who hang out with Sally Hawkins. (Cannavale in particular has some truly hilarious scenes.) Alec Baldwin and Peter Sarsgaard don't really have much to do in the movie, and Michael Stuhlbarg's character has only a single note to play.

And this is the largest problem, I think. Allen's film is scripted lazily. It is edited poorly. And there is so much repetition in the film ("Your husband was a crook!" "You can do better than this bum you're dating!" "Are you cheating on me with that au pair?" "You think you're so much better than me because you used to be rich.") that I was already bored fairly close to Blue Jasmine's beginning.

This doesn't take away from how great Cate Blanchett is as Jasmine herself, but it does make the whole thing a less than enjoyable experience as far as I was concerned. And frankly I find it really hard to sympathize with a woman with quite as much wealth as she has had when she has to take a computer class and work as a receptionist in a dentist's office. Get over yourself, lady.

I do want to say one more thing about Blue Jasmine. I've heard lots of people talking about Tennessee Williams and how this is in some way Allen's tribute to him or his version of A Streetcar Named Desire. I didn't see it. And Blue Jasmine's ending is pure Woody Allen. Even if the film is uneven, Allen's moral compass is still right on target.

7 Pyschopaths

The highly anticipated new film from In Bruges director Martin McDonagh is out, y'all. (It's been out, in fact, for two weeks.)

First of all, the eponymous seven are no seven samurai or magnificent seven (and, yes, I know those are the same thing), but rather a collection of disparate psychopaths connected by Los Angeles and a frustrated screenwriter named Martin (any relation to the writer-director of the film presumably intended).

In fact, some of the psychopaths in the title never even meet one another, and I am not actually sure how they all fit in the film. Neither is McDonagh, and I think that he is sort of fine with that. In many ways, Seven Psychopaths reminded me of the total mess that was Woody Allen's most recent film, To Rome with Love. Psychopaths is a much, much better movie than Allen's, but it has a lot of similarities with its absurd conventions, obvious self-referential qualities, and occasionally stilted acting.

Like Allen's film, too, McDonagh's is quite funny. This is worth a lot and I appreciated it. So few films are funny nowadays. But there are many laugh-out-loud moments in Seven Psychopaths, and they are even worth the loads of nonsense through which one is forced to wade in order to get there.

Psychopaths is a sort of collage of stories of psychopaths. Farrell's character is writing a screenplay about these seven psychopaths, but although his movie is not really the movie we're watching as far as I can tell, we get to see these short vignettes which are the movie, or are at least stories about psychopaths. I am not actually sure, in fact, how his movie must've turned out, but, we get pieces of it.

These stories are interesting. The best are Tom Waits's sequences, which seemed designed as a McDonagh-style nod to (the awesome) Jim Jarmusch. There is also a nod to Fincher, as well as a really great story with Harry Dean Stanton.

I want to say, too, that the acting in this film is excellent. Sam Rockwell, whom I have loved for years, is (again) great here. And Woody Harrelson and Colin Farrell are doing their usual excellent work. (It really is a shame that Farrell never got the kind of legitimate recognition that was promised with Tigerland. He really is very good.) But the stand-out is Christopher Walken, who gives what I think is an Academy-Award-worthy performance. I would not be surprised if he is mentioned at year's end. His performance is just beautiful work.

The other notable thing about Seven Psychopaths is the usual McDonagh coupling of gruesome, even grotesque violence with humor. Psychopaths is very funny, as I noted, but like In Bruges and like his plays – The Lonesome West, A Skull at Connemara, and The Pillowman, but particularly The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which I saw recently with Chris Pine – this humor is sort of about violence. McDonagh's characters are often irrational idiots, committing violence for arbitrary or asinine reasons, and thinking little about the consequences of their behavior. McDonagh's world is a one in which characters possess ethics that are inscrutable or absurd, and in which characters have no sense of life itself as sacred in any way.

Now, I am not quite sure that life is sacred, but as always I find McDonagh's own representational ethics baffling.  His work is funny, yes, but what is the point of all this hilarity? Why take the horrific banality of violence as a starting point and then transform that banality into humor as though it were so many episodes of Seinfeld? Frankly, I believe that McDonagh does have a larger project on which he is working, here. (I think Tarantino has a larger project, too.) But I'll be damned if I know what McDonagh's trying to do here. I liked this sprawling, self-reflexive, homage-filled, mess of a movie, but, as always with McDonagh, I wish for more than banality, terror, and severed carotid arteries.

2012's Nominees: Part 2 of 10

The Descendants

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Alexander Payne (Sideways)
• Actor: George Clooney (Syriana, Michael Clayton, Up in the Air)
• Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways), Nat Faxon, Jim Rash
• Editing 

Director: Payne

Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Beau Bridges, Nick Krause, Amara Miller, Robert Forster, Judy Greer, Matthew Lillard.

This is great. I am not used to really liking Alexander Payne movies, but this one was moving and sensitive and generous, and the performances are truly excellent. This already won the Golden Globe for Best Picture (Drama) which means that a lot of people like it even though it got only five nominations and Woodley got snubbed in the Supporting Actress category (a bit of a surprise). The screenplay may still win. If Clooney wins it will be his second acting Oscar. And he is great in this, so who could begrudge him?

Will Win: Adapted Screenplay

Could Win: Actor

My Rating: #16 out of 64

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

5 Nominations

• Actress: Rooney Mara
• Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth (The Social Network)
• Editing
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Daniel Craig, Mara, Robin Wright, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Goran Visnjic, Joely Richardson.

Okay, so this wasn't my favorite movie in the world when it came out – I spent a lot of time comparing it to last year's Swedish version – but it is easily one of the best made film's of the year and this movie seriously got robbed of some nominations and I'll say it. Most importantly, I think it really deserved a nomination for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's incredible score, and while I didn't think the screenplay was anything to write home about, the art direction certainly was. Dragon Tattoo definitely deserves its cinematography nod here, and I am betting on it to take home one trophy.

Will Win: Sound Mixing

Could Win: Cinematography, Editing, Sound Editing

My Rating: #33 out of 64

Midnight in Paris

4 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Woody Allen (Bullets over Broadway, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Broadway Danny Rose, Interiors, Annie Hall)
• Original Screenplay: Woody Allen (Match Point, Deconstructing Harry, Mighty Aphrodite, Bullets over Broadway, Husbands and Wives, Alice, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Radio Days, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, Manhattan, Interiors, Annie Hall)
• Art Direction: Hélène Dubreuil, Anne Seibel

Director: Allen

Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Carla Bruni, Kathy Bates, Tom Hiddleston, Alison Pill, Adrien Brody, Corey Stoll, Michael Sheen, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy.

This is why I can't be mad at the Academy for things. My favorites still get nominated for things. Four of the films in my top ten are nominated for Best Picture. It's hard for me to get angry about things like that. This movie deserves every accolade its getting. It's very funny, and smart, and boasts some superb performances. If you look at Allen's name up under Screenplay right there, you'll see that this is his fourteenth nomination for writing a movie. He is the man with the most writing nominations ever. He's won twice. I don't expect him to win this year, but the man is brilliant, and – evidently – he's back.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Screenplay

My Rating: #9 out of 64

The Help

4 Nominations

• Picture
• Actress: Viola Davis (Doubt)
• Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer
• Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain

Director: Tate Taylor

Cast: Emma Stone, Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Spencer, Chastain, Chris Lowell, Allison Janney, Cicely Tyson, Sissy Spacek, Ahna O'Reilly, Mike Vogel.

Viola Davis is great in this – she's also great in everything: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Solaris, Far from Heaven, Antwone Fisher. Even bad movies: Doubt, It's Kind of a Funny Story, you get the idea. I saw her once in a production of Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel and, well, I just love her. I will be completely delighted if she wins Best Actress. She's wonderful and she deserves an Oscar. Octavia Spencer has been doing excellent supporting work for years, as well, so I am delighted to see her get her due. And... I am not going to say another word about The Help.

Will Win: Supporting Actress

Could Win: Actress (this is really close, I think, but I am predicting Meryl to win)

My Rating: #55 out of 64

Fog

There is a particular joy in having seen a lot of films from a certain director. People occasionally insultingly tell me (usually after I've told them I didn't like some film they particularly liked) that I watch too many movies and so that's why I can't enjoy them. The implication is A) they are better judges of movies because they've seen fewer of them, B) that my judgment about that film they loved is wrong because I am a stuffy academic or something, and C) that I don't enjoy a lot of movies. In fact, I like most movies that I see and I am not even close to being an academic about film. I am at best an amateur. And as for being wrong about that film they liked, who cares? We like what we like. My take is, if you like a film, great. We can't argue about whether or not either of us liked a film objectively. It's not an objective discussion and never will be. If you loved Forrest Gump or Click or I don't know The Good Shepherd, you go right ahead and keep loving it. We don't all have to like the same things.

So I finally sat down the other night and watched Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog from 1991. It is a weird little movie. The plot is bizarre and the film jumps from sequence to sequence through a series of episodes with characters we only meet once and who never return. Madonna, for instance, has a single scene, as do Wallace Shawn, Julie Kavner, Kate Nelligan, etc. The whole setup is strange.

And indeed the whole point of the film is really the shadows and fog. Allen and his costars run up and down this sound stage which is built to look like some city in 1920s Europe and the whole movie is lit in bizarre ways, like an extended parody of film noir. It feels like Allen wrote the script just so he could shoot the picture in this way. And he and his DP have pushed this whole concept past the point of any sense, creating shadows with light from impossible sources and filling scenes with gratuitous fog. It is a delight.

The movie is also a comedy about a serial killer – Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is also a sort of murder/comedy film – a singularly odd combination. I had a great time watching this movie, and I think the reason I liked it as much as I did was because I am so familiar with Allen's other movies. The whole time I was watching Shadows and Fog I was thinking about how much fun Allen obviously had making the movie. His joy with the process of filmmaking was evident throughout the movie. And I found this pleasure infectious as I watched it.

I have seen almost all of Allen's movies, and I have this great book called Woody Allen on Woody Allen where he is interviewed by Stig Björkman about each of his films (up through Manhattan Murder Mystery), so whenever I see one I haven't seen before I go look up the interview to see what Allen had to say about it. Some of the fun things he said about Shadows and Fog are...

On being an artist:
I don't agree that the artist is superior; I'm not a believer in the specialness of the artist. I don't think that to have a talent is an achievement. I think it's a gift from God, sort of. I do think that if you're lucky to have a talent, that with that comes a certain responsibility. Just in the same sense as if you were born rich.

And on night and civilization:
Once you get out in the night, there is a sense that civilization is gone. All the stores are closed, everything is dark and it's a different feeling. You start to realize that the city is just a superimposed man-made convention and that the real thing that you're living on is a planet. It's a wild thing in nature. And all the civilization that protects you and enables you to lie to yourself about life is all man-made and superimposed.

Allen ends Shadows and Fog with a ridiculously whimsical sequence that steps outside of reality completely, even the reality of the film. It's a kind of senseless deus ex machina that I found quite charming, although I can see how some people might be really irritated by the device. Critics ate this film alive when it was first released and it doesn't surprise me one bit, but I found the whole thing just unabashedly silly – and that's a good thing, I think. Also, the movie is filled with cameos: It stars Mia Farrow, John Cusack, and John Malkovich, but Jodie Foster, Lily Tomlin, Kathy Bates, John C. Reilly, and William H. Macy all make brief appearances.

Thanksgiving in August: Catie

I think I met probably met Catie in the Spring of 2008 when we were both working on a (ludicrous but expensive) production of John Fletcher's The Woman's Prize. (Who does a random production of a Fletcher play from 1611 or whenever the Hell it was? FSU, that's who.) Catie was an understudy in the show, but listened attentively to every note I would give the actress she was understudying. She sat with me during rehearsals and paid close attention to anything and everything the director and I said.

In the summer of '08, a bunch of students got the idea to produce A Midsummer Night's Dream themselves and asked me to direct it. They had already pretty much cast the show themselves and my job was to make it look good, to make it work. I rearranged the cast and asked Catie to play both Peter Quince (she was ridiculously funny) and Hermia's eternally angry father Ægisthus. I didn't dress her as a man for either part, but we didn't change the genders at all. As Ægisthus we decided she would just be fabulous and pissed off the whole time. I wouldn't let her take her sunglasses off for the entirety of the show (in a nod to Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose). I cannot tell you the hilarity that ensued from this production. The show sold out almost every night and we would laugh ourselves silly with the antics we created. The lovers were funny, the mechanicals were funny, the fairies were funny. (The guy playing Bottom was awful, it must be said, but he was our only weak link.)

I kept getting assigned – or assigning myself – to shows with Catie after that. She was the star of an FSU production of She Stoops to Conquer (charming) in 2009. We learned together how to say mauvaise honte, how to hold our breaths for extended periods of time, and most importantly, how to talk across the room without anyone else knowing what we were saying.

The summer after her senior year, Catie and three of her close friends (all close friends of mine now) worked on a production of Sarah Kane's Crave with me. It was one of the most exciting projects I've ever done, and (oddly for the subject matter) the cast, designer, stage manager, assistant director, and I spent an inordinate amount of time laughing during rehearsal. In this show, Catie (and indeed the rest of the cast) proved themselves to be powerful, deeply moving performers, and the show was incredibly affecting, appropriately intense, and finally devastating. Several audience members came back more than once.

Catie and two other friends and I drove the twelve hours up to Endstation Theatre that summer, too, laughing the whole way. I will always find it difficult to say how much fun Catie and I have when we are together, whether we are mocking each other, or people we dislike, or people we like a whole lot.

Since Catie has moved away from Tallahassee (and atheist blessings for that), she has lived in London and in New York City, and we keep in touch frequently. Our relationship has deepened since she's left, and I have found myself relying on her for encouragement and support. We did the P90X program together, calling each other every day, texting photographs, pushing each other to work harder.I want to also say thank you to Catie for always making me laugh, sometimes until I can hardly stand it. The number of in-jokes and coded communications we have seem to be endless.

In May I was privileged to stand next to Catie in her bridal party as she got married (to her badass husband). It was such an honor, and I was so proud to be a part of such an important day. I am so grateful for this woman and for her presence in my life, and because, in a lot of ways, I have seen her grow up through college and into adulthood, I can also say that I am so proud of who she is becoming, where she is headed in her life, and of the work that I know she will do in the world.

Nostalgia

I have been posting so frequently about history and nostalgia, you probably think, dear reader, that I am becoming obsessed with the past. But au contraire; that is only partly true. What I am becoming interested in more and more is the way that we see the past. Why we need it. Let me offer a question:

Of what is the past productive for us? What does it give us?

These days I am reading Raymond Williams's wonderful book Marxism and Literature and
A) wishing I had read it when I was a first-year graduate student,
B) remembering how one needs to write the history of things before one begins to speak about them, and
C) feeling better about my own hesitation to actually write. There is so much to know before the writing starts.

But back to nostalgia.

One of the awesome things Williams says is that we think that tradition is some kind of fixed entity, a real thing. But to be more accurate, "tradition is in practice the most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits. ... What we have to see is not just 'a tradition' but a selective tradition: an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification." The past, in other words, is always being put to work in order to influence the present.

And that for which we are nostalgic is also a kind of produced feeling that another era or period was better than our own.

This is all preface to the two movies I've seen so far in 2011, both of which are actively about nostalgia: J.J. Abrams' Super 8 and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

I liked Super 8, and I really appreciated its brand of nostalgia - more a nostalgia for childhood than for a specific time period (like, say, American Graffiti or Avalon). The movie is cool, too - like the last Abrams movie - a great cast and lots of fun ideas.

People are saying the movie is derivative, and it is, but that's sort of okay for this sort of thing, I think. Super 8 has a lot of generic themes about being a kid, and it's hard not to be derivative in that department. I think this is mostly because we tend to re-imagine our childhoods so that they actively fit these images and tropes that movies give us. Many white people probably have re-imagined their childhoods so that they match the childhoods of the children in E.T.: the Extra-terrestrial and, oh, I don't know, American Beauty, if that makes sense.

My favorite part of Super 8 was seeing a lot of good actors - the film just kept surprising the audience with new ones: David Gallagher was a total trip and I loved seeing Dale Dickey, and especially Glynn Turman. Also: loved Michael Giacchino's score.

And I loved Woody Allen's new movie. LOVED. It's a total delight with even more wonderful cameos. The plot is totally nonsensical, of course, but the movie is just really really smart about nostalgia and the ways in which we pretend other time periods are better time periods. In Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson is obsessed with Paris in the 1920s, and then, somehow, finds himself there, visiting with Picasso and Cole Porter and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (and even Djuna Barnes!). It is hilarious from start to finish and also filled with wisdom and wit.

In Allen's film, the performances of these famous people don't match what we know from history about these people; instead, Allen has his actors play the characters like the fantasies they are. Zelda and Scott are exactly how you'd expect them to be: constantly drunk, attending parties every night, dancing until dawn. And Hemingway is as intense and self-important as you imagine. Salvador Dalí is an absolute lunatic. The actors in these parts are absolutely great; Adrien Brody as Dalí is giving a particularly inspired performance that might actually border on genius. I could not stop laughing.

In typical Allen philosophy, too, one must learn to live in the world one inhabits. (Think Purple Rose of Cairo.) Nostalgia is only good if it helps us to make the present better - not by going back, never by going back - by going forward. Allen, as usual, I think, encourages us to live with the world we have and stop trying to make it into something it used to be - especially because it was never really "what it used to be" in the first place.

Philip Glass

As you probably know if you know me, I love Philip Glass. So I was delighted to finally sit down and watch Scott Hicks's documentary on the legendary composer.

It's not a very ambitious film, and it is, in a lot of ways, a kind of puff-piece—a movie a director would make about his good friend.

Still, because of my love for Glass, I found the film fascinating. I loved learning about him, his collaborators, his family life, his way of working, his spirituality, etc.

I even found the whole thing rather inspiring. And it, of course, made me want to run out and buy some more Philip Glass music.

Also, look for a cameo from The Reader composer Nico Muhly, who is my age (!) and who used to work for Glass; I might be a little in love with him. There are also appearances from Dennis Russell Davies, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Chuck Close, JoAnne Akalaitis, Errol Morris, and others.

New Allen; Same as the Old Allen?

Many have remarked that Interiors—one of my favorite Woody Allen movies—is Allen's Bergman movie. So totally is Interiors a tribute, a loving homage, to Bergman, that it is impossible not to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen's newest feature, as a tribute to a man who is clearly one of Allen's new favorite filmmakers.

For Vicky Cristina Barcelona is obviously a loving homage to that master of camp, that brilliant genius of storytelling: Pedro Almodóvar. Allen has adopted a kind of feeling of Almodóvar for his newest film, and the moments when this Almodóvage shine through Allen's script are the film's best.

I liked Vicky Cristina Barcelona quite a bit, but I also feel the same way about it that I felt about Allen's other 2008 feature. The problem, see, is that Allen still has really great stories to tell, he just isn't so great at telling the stories anymore. As such, Vicky Cristina Barcelona knows a lot about human nature, love, relationships, desperation, and passion. In this way it is a smart, even wise, film from an aging, brilliant director. But most of Allen's formal devices don't work well at all. The entirety of the film, for instance, is framed by a narrator telling the film's audience all about the characters and their weaknesses and foibles. The benefits of this are manifold: the exposition is easily, cleverly delivered, and is immediately dispensed with; conflicts are created without dialogue; glances and gestures become immediately much more meaningful. But the narration sacrifices something incredibly important. We know the characters extremely well from the beginning of the film due to the narrator's voice, but he (it's a man's voice) also creates a distance between us and the characters. So we become better than them, smarter than them. We know their weaknesses and so we don't need to discover them. This gives the whole film a cynical, rather glib air, and our affection for the characters suffers for it.

One more thing needs to be said about Vicky Cristina Barcelona, though, and that is that I must tell you that Penélope Cruz is a revelation. I can't remember her sexier or funnier or more fabulous, even in an Almodóvar film. I think that may be because Almodóvar's films usually have several fabulous, sexy, funny women in them, and Allen's movie has only Miss Cruz. As it is, Allen has written Penélope Cruz one of her best roles ever, and easily her best English-speaking role. Cruz is a firestorm: a wicked, fantastic, cruel creature who destroys everything she touches but is incredibly vulnerable and sad. It's a great performance in a film that, the more she is on-screen, seems to exist only to showcase her. Cruz takes over this movie. She is the only thing anyone will be talking about when they leave this movie. It's a tour-de-force, not to be missed, and I hope she gets nominated for an Oscar. She's that great.

Back to la Escuela

Today will be the first day of my third year of graduate school, the first day of my PhD program. And I hope to be posting on here more often.

I may even (finally) post a review of Woody Allen's new feature Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

It's been raining here seemingly forever. The heavens began to empty on Friday morning, and the deluge lets up here only periodically, for an hour or so, and then it begins again. The power has stayed on at my house, though, at least for now. (I heard others in the Hassiest of Tallys lost theirs for several hours.) And now I've heard that the rain wil not stop until next Sunday: next Sunday. We are to have an entire week filled with lots of rain.
But it is the first day back to school and I suppose this is better than sweltering heat...

Oh, Woody.

I dreamed about my old job at the airport last night and my old boss the CEO. This probably has to do with me worrying about money and wishing that I were still making lots of it (comparatively) instead of working for pennies at Florida State. I miss the job itself, too, actually.

Yesterday I watched Woody Allen's first 2008 film (the second one is called Vicky Christina Barcelona and will be out later in the year). This first one is called Cassandra's Dream, which is the name of a boat in the movie, but is, of course, a reference to the mythological Greek character Cassandra and her dream of the destruction of Troy, which is ignored by everyone else in the city. There are only a couple other references to ancient Greece in the film, but it is structured like one of the old plays and so the title fits rather well.

I liked Cassandra's Dream or, rather, I wanted to like Cassandra's Dream, but it doesn't work. This is because it thinks it is a suspense film à la Match Point, but it isn't a suspense film at all. What the movie could have been is a really interesting character study. Cassandra's Dream focuses around two brothers: Colin Farrell (love him) and Ewan MacGregor (love him, too), their financial difficulties, and the murder they eventually decide to commit in order to help themselves out of their financial difficulties. MacGregor's character is fine with the murder, it upsets him slightly, but he focuses on the future and lets it go. Farrell's character is affected deeply by the murder and becomes depressed, irrational, uncontainable. You can probably guess where this is all headed and the movie (up until the very last minutes of the film) is incredibly straightforward and is almost boring in its predictability. Unlike Match Point, I always felt like I knew what was going to happen in this film. My point is that there is no suspense. We know what is going to happen. The characters, however, are fascinating, and turning a focus toward the study of character—and the excellent acting talent of the film's leads—would have been the way to make this film worth watching. As it is, Allen (one of my favorite directors of all time, in case you didn't know) focuses on suspense that never builds and tension that never rises.

Cassandra's Dream, unfortunately, is almost a total misfire. Well acted, well conceived, but ill executed.

On The Purple Rose of Cairo

From Woody Allen on Woody Allen by Stig Björkman:

I wrote a story based on only this: that a woman's dream man comes off the screen and she's in love with him, and then the real actor appears and she's forced to choose between reality and fantasy. And of course one can't choose fantasy, because that can lead to madness, so one has to choose reality. And when you choose reality, you get hurt. As simple as that.

Don't know why I've been thinking about this movie, but it's been in my head lately.

I should post a real update on my life. Maybe tomorrow.

Bergmanesque

Everyone always said that The Seventh Seal, Bergman's 1957 meditation on death (and the film that made him a star) was a film about a man playing chess with Death. Um, okay, so Max Von Sydow does play chess with Death, but the film isn't about a dance with death or anything like that. Von Sydow isn't even the star of the film.

Instead, The Seventh Seal is a very cool and intriguing meditation on how each of us deals with death, how we run from it, the different ways we try to stave it off. It's also filled with all kinds of atheist meditations about the alleged afterlife and asks moral questions about saving lives and causing deaths and the ludicrousness of religious fervor in the face of death. It's an intriguing, beautifully shot film with a great ending and some lovely poetic moments. Gunnar Björnstrand, the film's star (he plays Von Sydow's squire) is wonderful: skeptical, practical and filled with hate, both for his master and most of the people around him, and yet truly compassionate and generous. It's a wonderful role and the actor is great.

Truth be told, the bits with Death and the chessboard were all kind of silly, almost laughable. I couldn't help chuckling at the first scene with Death on the beach. All I could think of was Woody Allen's Love and Death. Allen loves Bergman and his spoof of The Seventh Seal is an ingenious one. At any rate, I quite liked the film, mostly because it wasn't at all what I was expecting.

P.S. I'm currently reading some Charles Busch plays (The Lady in Question, Psycho Beach Party, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom). This shit is hilarious.