list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Annie Hall on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Annie_Hall/1480/default.aspx Title: Annie Hall
Year: 1977
Director: Woody Allen
Plot: Woody Allen's romantic comedy of the Me Decade follows the up and down relationship of two mismatched New York neurotics. Jewish comedy writer Alvy Singer (Allen) ponders the modern quest for love and his past romance with tightly-wound WASP singer Annie Hall (Diane Keaton, née Diane Hall). The twice-divorced Alvy knows that it's not easy to find a mate when the options include pretentious New York intellectuals and lifestyle-obsessed Rolling Stone writers, but la-di-dah-ing Annie seems different. Along the rocky road of their coupling, Allen/Alvy weigh in on such topics as endless therapy, movies vs. TV, the absurdity of dating rituals, anti-Semitism, drugs, and, in one of the best set pieces, repressed Midwestern WASP insanity vs. crazy Brooklyn Jewish boisterousness. Annie wants to move to Los Angeles to find that fame that finally does in the relationship -- but not before Alvy gets in a few digs at vacuous, mantra-fixated California. Originally entitled Anhedonia (the inability to enjoy oneself), Annie Hall blended the slapstick and fantasy from such earlier Allen films as Sleeper (1973) and Bananas (1971) with the more autobiographical musings of his stand-up and written comedy, using an array of such movie techniques as talking heads, splitscreens, and subtitles. Within these gleeful formal experiments and sight gags, Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman skewered 1970s solipsism, reversing the happy marriage of opposites found in classic screwball comedies. Hailed as Allen's most mature and personal film, Annie Hall beat out Star Wars for Best Picture and also won Oscars for Allen as director and writer and for Keaton as Best Actress; audiences enthusiastically responded to Allen's take on contemporary love and turned Keaton's rumpled menswear into a fashion trend. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 60
Number of Lists: 103
Number of blog posts: 8
Number of discussion threads: 8
SpoutRating: 4
]]>Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:51:06 GMTAnnie Hall1977Woody Allen<a href="/players/P____79388/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Woody Allen</a>'s romantic comedy of the Me Decade follows the up and down relationship of two mismatched New York neurotics. Jewish comedy writer Alvy Singer (Allen) ponders the modern quest for love and his past romance with tightly-wound WASP singer Annie Hall (<a href="/players/P____96996/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Diane Keaton</a>, née Diane Hall). The twice-divorced Alvy knows that it's not easy to find a mate when the options include pretentious New York intellectuals and lifestyle-obsessed <I>Rolling Stone</I> writers, but la-di-dah-ing Annie seems different. Along the rocky road of their coupling, Allen/Alvy weigh in on such topics as endless therapy, movies vs. TV, the absurdity of dating rituals, anti-Semitism, drugs, and, in one of the best set pieces, repressed Midwestern WASP insanity vs. crazy Brooklyn Jewish boisterousness. Annie wants to move to Los Angeles to find that fame that finally does in the relationship -- but not before Alvy gets in a few digs at vacuous, mantra-fixated California. Originally entitled <I>Anhedonia</I> (the inability to enjoy oneself), Annie Hall blended the slapstick and fantasy from such earlier Allen films as <a href=/films/31688/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Sleeper</a> (1973) and <a href=/films/2273/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Bananas</a> (1971) with the more autobiographical musings of his stand-up and written comedy, using an array of such movie techniques as talking heads, splitscreens, and subtitles. Within these gleeful formal experiments and sight gags, Allen and co-writer <a href="/players/P____82994/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Marshall Brickman</a> skewered 1970s solipsism, reversing the happy marriage of opposites found in classic screwball comedies. Hailed as Allen's most mature and personal film, Annie Hall beat out <a href=/films/32762/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Star Wars</a> for Best Picture and also won Oscars for Allen as director and writer and for Keaton as Best Actress; audiences enthusiastically responded to Allen's take on contemporary love and turned Keaton's rumpled menswear into a fashion trend. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide60Tag Target (>10)103884http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/t00950rimgn.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Annie_Hall/1480/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/7/8/42953.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 7/8/2009 9:00:45 AM
Body: Whatever Works, though intentionally foolish and cartoonish where Vicky Cristina Barcelona is dry and pointed, is so in the same mode as a late-Woody Allen inquiry into the ways we learn (and forget) lessons about love that it almost can’t merit its own review. It’s another film unfairly criticized for its so-called naivete, one which has to be wide-eyed in order reflect Allen’s persistent befuddlement over the mysteries of desire. Whatever Works comes around to an uncynical acceptance of the heart wanting what it wants, with every partner swapped and every pagan pair blessed, a nice clean ending that could be confused with cliche. But as Larry David says on screen, “Sometimes a cliche is the best way to say it.” With Whatever Works shaping up to be ‘Allen’s second consecutive summer hit, it seems like as good a time as any to revisit a post I wrote last year, inspired by negative reviews for the eventually Oscar-winning Vicky. To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them. To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that. The plot of Vicky Cristina –– like those of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point, the two Late Allen films it most resembles –– is barely more than a mechanism on which to hang Allen’s endless skepticism. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, a British girl doing naive but well-meaning Upper West Side academic) is going to Spain for the summer to stay with a family friend and work on a grad school thesis. It’s Vicky’s last summer before she gets married, and where another girl might be a bit more concerned with making the most of the last months of her sexual freedom, Vicky seems more preoccupied with the notion that the thesis represents her last chance at intellectual self-indulgence before her very sensible fiancee knocks her up and all vestiges of her identity as an independent woman must be put away. Vicky’s last minute escort on the trip is Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a wild child ball of blonde hair and bad decisions, who tags along to Barcelona to escape a bad break-up with hopes of finding her calling as an old-world romantic-creative. Thanks mainly to Cristina’s predatory eyes, the girls soon meet a painter, Juan Antonio, who they’ve heard has a torrid history with an ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). They let this smoldering artist at least 15 years their senior fly them to his hometown of Oviedo regardless of Vicky’s objections, and there the eager-to-bed Cristina comes down with food poisoning, leaving Vicky fall into Juan Antonio’s arms. But once the trio returns to Barcelona, order is restored: Juan and Cristina embark on the flagrantly cliche February-July muse-master relationship that always seemed in the cards, and Vicky dives back into her work and wedding plans. The status quo is interrupted once again when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria-Elena re-enters the picture, she and Cristina first fight over and then figure out a way to happily share the lucky Spaniard, and, as she continues to be haunted by a night that seems “unreal”, Vicky starts to wonder if her entire life plan is ill-conceived. If this sounds familiar, well, maybe we’ve hit on one of Late Allen’s easiest targets for criticism. Over and over again in this late career stretch, he’s rehearsing variations on the same preccupations: romance is fleeting, meaning and passion are both subjective and fluid; fate and luck are, in practice, basically the same thing; there are two types of fear: fear to act on our desires, and fear to do anything but. As Bardem’s character puts it at one point: “The trick is to enjoy life, and accept that it has no meaning.” This could be a direct quote from a number of recent Allen interviews, and it’s a sign of how seriously he’s invested in the essential existential question of the material: If none of it matters anyway, is it best to live impulsively and suffer disappointment, or take the safe, no thrills route, forsaking the manic highs in order to avoid the lowest lows? Another potentially valid, but only if unexamined, points of criticism almost always directed at Late Allen: in order to explore his pet themes from a distance, he seems to want to make his characters as shallow as possible. Speaking their lines with a flatness that almost approaches a read-aloud from high school English class, crowded into going through the motions of the dictates of an all-seeing narrator, the actors’ characterizations are, almost by default, mainly surface. Cruz has to do little more than look comfortable in the markedly “ethnic,” bag lady slut chic in which she’s dressed in order to put across Maria-Elena as an icon of the Scary/Sexy Exotic; Johansson, done up like a summer Gap ad loosely based on …And God Created Woman, basically just has to show up and Allen has the Narcissist Heartbreaker he needs in order to define, by contrast, Hall’s Frustrated Realist. (For all of the prudish questioning of the propriety of the Allen/ScarJo relationship, Vicky Cristina is evidence that Allen’s leering is at least a means to an end. Despite the limits of her character, Johansson is more present on screen here than I’ve seen her since Lost in Translation. He may love her, but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.) Rather than fault Allen for blatantly eschewing a realism that I don’t think was ever on his agenda to begin with, I think there’s something interesting about the falseness of it all–the unnecessary, didactic narration, the cliche personalities crashing into one another, and the very, very minor fissures that result. His point is taken: nothing ultimately, means anything, but in the moment, we forget that, and become convinced that inconsequential matters mean the world. Vicky Cristina Barcelona may be frivolous, but under the surface there’s a serious pondering of how the most frivolous things can temporarily cloud brains and hold otherwise reasonable people hostage, of how even a momentary giving over to impulse can slip an unignorable pea under the mattress of the best laid plans, of how sometimes functioning facades are shattered by a single slip of judgment over the course of a single night. Above all else, Vicky Cristina reveals that Allen is developing a late career style of distant, extremely expository satire of romantic givens. The American girls, smart and experienced though they think they are and even might be, are reduced to fools by their attraction to the Spanish painter. They remain consumed with the question of what their dalliances mean, convinced they must mean something, even after he’s told them repeatedly that nothing means anything. This is insanity defined—holding onto faith that something is true when all evidence would mark it as false–and it’s this lust-bred insanity that’s the more precise Allen theme than the oft-cited neorosis. In Vicky Cristina, as the events play out in a tone pitched about ten degrees closer to comedy than tragedy, Allen mocks his girls for their illusions–harshly, at times, but not without sympathy. He’s been there. Call it autopilot, call it barrel scraping, but I believe he’s still really baffled about various unsolvable mysteries of human nature. The benefit of age may be that he’s finally boiled his issues down from prickly, all-encompassing nuerosis, into an almost elegantly restricted package of major questions about human nature that, after nearly 73 years on the planet, he still can’t figure out. And even if these later films themselves are inconsistently moving, I’m touched by the gesture itself, the taking stock of one’s own life-long search for meaning, the mistakes made along the way, and the frustrations of coming up empty. Whether hidden under sultry sun or cold British class conflict or the pretenses of New York intelligencia, there are traces in all of Allen’s later films of unforgiving moral comedowns, as could only be conjured by someone whose own moral stumbles have gone largely unforgiven. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:00:45 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog7/8/2009 9:00:45 AM Whatever Works, though intentionally foolish and cartoonish where Vicky Cristina Barcelona is dry and pointed, is so in the same mode as a late-Woody Allen inquiry into the ways we learn (and forget) lessons about love that it almost can’t merit its own review. It’s another film unfairly criticized for its so-called naivete, one which has to be wide-eyed in order reflect Allen’s persistent befuddlement over the mysteries of desire. Whatever Works comes around to an uncynical acceptance of the heart wanting what it wants, with every partner swapped and every pagan pair blessed, a nice clean ending that could be confused with cliche. But as Larry David says on screen, “Sometimes a cliche is the best way to say it.” With Whatever Works shaping up to be ‘Allen’s second consecutive summer hit, it seems like as good a time as any to revisit a post I wrote last year, inspired by negative reviews for the eventually Oscar-winning Vicky. To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them. To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that. The plot of Vicky Cristina –– like those of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point, the two Late Allen films it most resembles –– is barely more than a mechanism on which to hang Allen’s endless skepticism. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, a British girl doing naive but well-meaning Upper West Side academic) is going to Spain for the summer to stay with a family friend and work on a grad school thesis. It’s Vicky’s last summer before she gets married, and where another girl might be a bit more concerned with making the most of the last months of her sexual freedom, Vicky seems more preoccupied with the notion that the thesis represents her last chance at intellectual self-indulgence before her very sensible fiancee knocks her up and all vestiges of her identity as an independent woman must be put away. Vicky’s last minute escort on the trip is Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a wild child ball of blonde hair and bad decisions, who tags along to Barcelona to escape a bad break-up with hopes of finding her calling as an old-world romantic-creative. Thanks mainly to Cristina’s predatory eyes, the girls soon meet a painter, Juan Antonio, who they’ve heard has a torrid history with an ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). They let this smoldering artist at least 15 years their senior fly them to his hometown of Oviedo regardless of Vicky’s objections, and there the eager-to-bed Cristina comes down with food poisoning, leaving Vicky fall into Juan Antonio’s arms. But once the trio returns to Barcelona, order is restored: Juan and Cristina embark on the flagrantly cliche February-July muse-master relationship that always seemed in the cards, and Vicky dives back into her work and wedding plans. The status quo is interrupted once again when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria-Elena re-enters the picture, she and Cristina first fight over and then figure out a way to happily share the lucky Spaniard, and, as she continues to be haunted by a night that seems “unreal”, Vicky starts to wonder if her entire life plan is ill-conceived. If this sounds familiar, well, maybe we’ve hit on one of Late Allen’s easiest targets for criticism. Over and over again in this late career stretch, he’s rehearsing variations on the same preccupations: romance is fleeting, meaning and passion are both subjective and fluid; fate and luck are, in practice, basically the same thing; there are two types of fear: fear to act on our desires, and fear to do anything but. As Bardem’s character puts it at one point: “The trick is to enjoy life, and accept that it has no meaning.” This could be a direct quote from a number of recent Allen interviews, and it’s a sign of how seriously he’s invested in the essential existential question of the material: If none of it matters anyway, is it best to live impulsively and suffer disappointment, or take the safe, no thrills route, forsaking the manic highs in order to avoid the lowest lows? Another potentially valid, but only if unexamined, points of criticism almost always directed at Late Allen: in order to explore his pet themes from a distance, he seems to want to make his characters as shallow as possible. Speaking their lines with a flatness that almost approaches a read-aloud from high school English class, crowded into going through the motions of the dictates of an all-seeing narrator, the actors’ characterizations are, almost by default, mainly surface. Cruz has to do little more than look comfortable in the markedly “ethnic,” bag lady slut chic in which she’s dressed in order to put across Maria-Elena as an icon of the Scary/Sexy Exotic; Johansson, done up like a summer Gap ad loosely based on …And God Created Woman, basically just has to show up and Allen has the Narcissist Heartbreaker he needs in order to define, by contrast, Hall’s Frustrated Realist. (For all of the prudish questioning of the propriety of the Allen/ScarJo relationship, Vicky Cristina is evidence that Allen’s leering is at least a means to an end. Despite the limits of her character, Johansson is more present on screen here than I’ve seen her since Lost in Translation. He may love her, but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.) Rather than fault Allen for blatantly eschewing a realism that I don’t think was ever on his agenda to begin with, I think there’s something interesting about the falseness of it all–the unnecessary, didactic narration, the cliche personalities crashing into one another, and the very, very minor fissures that result. His point is taken: nothing ultimately, means anything, but in the moment, we forget that, and become convinced that inconsequential matters mean the world. Vicky Cristina Barcelona may be frivolous, but under the surface there’s a serious pondering of how the most frivolous things can temporarily cloud brains and hold otherwise reasonable people hostage, of how even a momentary giving over to impulse can slip an unignorable pea under the mattress of the best laid plans, of how sometimes functioning facades are shattered by a single slip of judgment over the course of a single night. Above all else, Vicky Cristina reveals that Allen is developing a late career style of distant, extremely expository satire of romantic givens. The American girls, smart and experienced though they think they are and even might be, are reduced to fools by their attraction to the Spanish painter. They remain consumed with the question of what their dalliances mean, convinced they must mean something, even after he’s told them repeatedly that nothing means anything. This is insanity defined—holding onto faith that something is true when all evidence would mark it as false–and it’s this lust-bred insanity that’s the more precise Allen theme than the oft-cited neorosis. In Vicky Cristina, as the events play out in a tone pitched about ten degrees closer to comedy than tragedy, Allen mocks his girls for their illusions–harshly, at times, but not without sympathy. He’s been there. Call it autopilot, call it barrel scraping, but I believe he’s still really baffled about various unsolvable mysteries of human nature. The benefit of age may be that he’s finally boiled his issues down from prickly, all-encompassing nuerosis, into an almost elegantly restricted package of major questions about human nature that, after nearly 73 years on the planet, he still can’t figure out. And even if these later films themselves are inconsistently moving, I’m touched by the gesture itself, the taking stock of one’s own life-long search for meaning, the mistakes made along the way, and the frustrations of coming up empty. Whether hidden under sultry sun or cold British class conflict or the pretenses of New York intelligencia, there are traces in all of Allen’s later films of unforgiving moral comedowns, as could only be conjured by someone whose own moral stumbles have gone largely unforgiven. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/7/8/42952.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 7/8/2009 9:00:31 AM
Body: Whatever Works, though intentionally foolish and cartoonish where Vicky Cristina Barcelona is dry and pointed, is so in the same mode as a late-Woody Allen inquiry into the ways we learn (and forget) lessons about love that it almost can’t merit its own review. It’s another film unfairly criticized for its so-called naivete, one which has to be wide-eyed in order reflect Allen’s persistent befuddlement over the mysteries of desire. Whatever Works comes around to an uncynical acceptance of the heart wanting what it wants, with every partner swapped and every pagan pair blessed, a nice clean ending that could be confused with cliche. But as Larry David says on screen, “Sometimes a cliche is the best way to say it.” With Whatever Works shaping up to be ‘Allen’s second consecutive summer hit, it seems like as good a time as any to revisit a post I wrote last year, inspired by negative reviews for the eventually Oscar-winning Vicky. To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them. To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that. The plot of Vicky Cristina –– like those of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point, the two Late Allen films it most resembles –– is barely more than a mechanism on which to hang Allen’s endless skepticism. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, a British girl doing naive but well-meaning Upper West Side academic) is going to Spain for the summer to stay with a family friend and work on a grad school thesis. It’s Vicky’s last summer before she gets married, and where another girl might be a bit more concerned with making the most of the last months of her sexual freedom, Vicky seems more preoccupied with the notion that the thesis represents her last chance at intellectual self-indulgence before her very sensible fiancee knocks her up and all vestiges of her identity as an independent woman must be put away. Vicky’s last minute escort on the trip is Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a wild child ball of blonde hair and bad decisions, who tags along to Barcelona to escape a bad break-up with hopes of finding her calling as an old-world romantic-creative. Thanks mainly to Cristina’s predatory eyes, the girls soon meet a painter, Juan Antonio, who they’ve heard has a torrid history with an ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). They let this smoldering artist at least 15 years their senior fly them to his hometown of Oviedo regardless of Vicky’s objections, and there the eager-to-bed Cristina comes down with food poisoning, leaving Vicky fall into Juan Antonio’s arms. But once the trio returns to Barcelona, order is restored: Juan and Cristina embark on the flagrantly cliche February-July muse-master relationship that always seemed in the cards, and Vicky dives back into her work and wedding plans. The status quo is interrupted once again when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria-Elena re-enters the picture, she and Cristina first fight over and then figure out a way to happily share the lucky Spaniard, and, as she continues to be haunted by a night that seems “unreal”, Vicky starts to wonder if her entire life plan is ill-conceived. If this sounds familiar, well, maybe we’ve hit on one of Late Allen’s easiest targets for criticism. Over and over again in this late career stretch, he’s rehearsing variations on the same preccupations: romance is fleeting, meaning and passion are both subjective and fluid; fate and luck are, in practice, basically the same thing; there are two types of fear: fear to act on our desires, and fear to do anything but. As Bardem’s character puts it at one point: “The trick is to enjoy life, and accept that it has no meaning.” This could be a direct quote from a number of recent Allen interviews, and it’s a sign of how seriously he’s invested in the essential existential question of the material: If none of it matters anyway, is it best to live impulsively and suffer disappointment, or take the safe, no thrills route, forsaking the manic highs in order to avoid the lowest lows? Another potentially valid, but only if unexamined, points of criticism almost always directed at Late Allen: in order to explore his pet themes from a distance, he seems to want to make his characters as shallow as possible. Speaking their lines with a flatness that almost approaches a read-aloud from high school English class, crowded into going through the motions of the dictates of an all-seeing narrator, the actors’ characterizations are, almost by default, mainly surface. Cruz has to do little more than look comfortable in the markedly “ethnic,” bag lady slut chic in which she’s dressed in order to put across Maria-Elena as an icon of the Scary/Sexy Exotic; Johansson, done up like a summer Gap ad loosely based on …And God Created Woman, basically just has to show up and Allen has the Narcissist Heartbreaker he needs in order to define, by contrast, Hall’s Frustrated Realist. (For all of the prudish questioning of the propriety of the Allen/ScarJo relationship, Vicky Cristina is evidence that Allen’s leering is at least a means to an end. Despite the limits of her character, Johansson is more present on screen here than I’ve seen her since Lost in Translation. He may love her, but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.) Rather than fault Allen for blatantly eschewing a realism that I don’t think was ever on his agenda to begin with, I think there’s something interesting about the falseness of it all–the unnecessary, didactic narration, the cliche personalities crashing into one another, and the very, very minor fissures that result. His point is taken: nothing ultimately, means anything, but in the moment, we forget that, and become convinced that inconsequential matters mean the world. Vicky Cristina Barcelona may be frivolous, but under the surface there’s a serious pondering of how the most frivolous things can temporarily cloud brains and hold otherwise reasonable people hostage, of how even a momentary giving over to impulse can slip an unignorable pea under the mattress of the best laid plans, of how sometimes functioning facades are shattered by a single slip of judgment over the course of a single night. Above all else, Vicky Cristina reveals that Allen is developing a late career style of distant, extremely expository satire of romantic givens. The American girls, smart and experienced though they think they are and even might be, are reduced to fools by their attraction to the Spanish painter. They remain consumed with the question of what their dalliances mean, convinced they must mean something, even after he’s told them repeatedly that nothing means anything. This is insanity defined—holding onto faith that something is true when all evidence would mark it as false–and it’s this lust-bred insanity that’s the more precise Allen theme than the oft-cited neorosis. In Vicky Cristina, as the events play out in a tone pitched about ten degrees closer to comedy than tragedy, Allen mocks his girls for their illusions–harshly, at times, but not without sympathy. He’s been there. Call it autopilot, call it barrel scraping, but I believe he’s still really baffled about various unsolvable mysteries of human nature. The benefit of age may be that he’s finally boiled his issues down from prickly, all-encompassing nuerosis, into an almost elegantly restricted package of major questions about human nature that, after nearly 73 years on the planet, he still can’t figure out. And even if these later films themselves are inconsistently moving, I’m touched by the gesture itself, the taking stock of one’s own life-long search for meaning, the mistakes made along the way, and the frustrations of coming up empty. Whether hidden under sultry sun or cold British class conflict or the pretenses of New York intelligencia, there are traces in all of Allen’s later films of unforgiving moral comedowns, as could only be conjured by someone whose own moral stumbles have gone largely unforgiven. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:00:31 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com7/8/2009 9:00:31 AM Whatever Works, though intentionally foolish and cartoonish where Vicky Cristina Barcelona is dry and pointed, is so in the same mode as a late-Woody Allen inquiry into the ways we learn (and forget) lessons about love that it almost can’t merit its own review. It’s another film unfairly criticized for its so-called naivete, one which has to be wide-eyed in order reflect Allen’s persistent befuddlement over the mysteries of desire. Whatever Works comes around to an uncynical acceptance of the heart wanting what it wants, with every partner swapped and every pagan pair blessed, a nice clean ending that could be confused with cliche. But as Larry David says on screen, “Sometimes a cliche is the best way to say it.” With Whatever Works shaping up to be ‘Allen’s second consecutive summer hit, it seems like as good a time as any to revisit a post I wrote last year, inspired by negative reviews for the eventually Oscar-winning Vicky. To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them. To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that. The plot of Vicky Cristina –– like those of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point, the two Late Allen films it most resembles –– is barely more than a mechanism on which to hang Allen’s endless skepticism. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, a British girl doing naive but well-meaning Upper West Side academic) is going to Spain for the summer to stay with a family friend and work on a grad school thesis. It’s Vicky’s last summer before she gets married, and where another girl might be a bit more concerned with making the most of the last months of her sexual freedom, Vicky seems more preoccupied with the notion that the thesis represents her last chance at intellectual self-indulgence before her very sensible fiancee knocks her up and all vestiges of her identity as an independent woman must be put away. Vicky’s last minute escort on the trip is Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a wild child ball of blonde hair and bad decisions, who tags along to Barcelona to escape a bad break-up with hopes of finding her calling as an old-world romantic-creative. Thanks mainly to Cristina’s predatory eyes, the girls soon meet a painter, Juan Antonio, who they’ve heard has a torrid history with an ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). They let this smoldering artist at least 15 years their senior fly them to his hometown of Oviedo regardless of Vicky’s objections, and there the eager-to-bed Cristina comes down with food poisoning, leaving Vicky fall into Juan Antonio’s arms. But once the trio returns to Barcelona, order is restored: Juan and Cristina embark on the flagrantly cliche February-July muse-master relationship that always seemed in the cards, and Vicky dives back into her work and wedding plans. The status quo is interrupted once again when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria-Elena re-enters the picture, she and Cristina first fight over and then figure out a way to happily share the lucky Spaniard, and, as she continues to be haunted by a night that seems “unreal”, Vicky starts to wonder if her entire life plan is ill-conceived. If this sounds familiar, well, maybe we’ve hit on one of Late Allen’s easiest targets for criticism. Over and over again in this late career stretch, he’s rehearsing variations on the same preccupations: romance is fleeting, meaning and passion are both subjective and fluid; fate and luck are, in practice, basically the same thing; there are two types of fear: fear to act on our desires, and fear to do anything but. As Bardem’s character puts it at one point: “The trick is to enjoy life, and accept that it has no meaning.” This could be a direct quote from a number of recent Allen interviews, and it’s a sign of how seriously he’s invested in the essential existential question of the material: If none of it matters anyway, is it best to live impulsively and suffer disappointment, or take the safe, no thrills route, forsaking the manic highs in order to avoid the lowest lows? Another potentially valid, but only if unexamined, points of criticism almost always directed at Late Allen: in order to explore his pet themes from a distance, he seems to want to make his characters as shallow as possible. Speaking their lines with a flatness that almost approaches a read-aloud from high school English class, crowded into going through the motions of the dictates of an all-seeing narrator, the actors’ characterizations are, almost by default, mainly surface. Cruz has to do little more than look comfortable in the markedly “ethnic,” bag lady slut chic in which she’s dressed in order to put across Maria-Elena as an icon of the Scary/Sexy Exotic; Johansson, done up like a summer Gap ad loosely based on …And God Created Woman, basically just has to show up and Allen has the Narcissist Heartbreaker he needs in order to define, by contrast, Hall’s Frustrated Realist. (For all of the prudish questioning of the propriety of the Allen/ScarJo relationship, Vicky Cristina is evidence that Allen’s leering is at least a means to an end. Despite the limits of her character, Johansson is more present on screen here than I’ve seen her since Lost in Translation. He may love her, but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.) Rather than fault Allen for blatantly eschewing a realism that I don’t think was ever on his agenda to begin with, I think there’s something interesting about the falseness of it all–the unnecessary, didactic narration, the cliche personalities crashing into one another, and the very, very minor fissures that result. His point is taken: nothing ultimately, means anything, but in the moment, we forget that, and become convinced that inconsequential matters mean the world. Vicky Cristina Barcelona may be frivolous, but under the surface there’s a serious pondering of how the most frivolous things can temporarily cloud brains and hold otherwise reasonable people hostage, of how even a momentary giving over to impulse can slip an unignorable pea under the mattress of the best laid plans, of how sometimes functioning facades are shattered by a single slip of judgment over the course of a single night. Above all else, Vicky Cristina reveals that Allen is developing a late career style of distant, extremely expository satire of romantic givens. The American girls, smart and experienced though they think they are and even might be, are reduced to fools by their attraction to the Spanish painter. They remain consumed with the question of what their dalliances mean, convinced they must mean something, even after he’s told them repeatedly that nothing means anything. This is insanity defined—holding onto faith that something is true when all evidence would mark it as false–and it’s this lust-bred insanity that’s the more precise Allen theme than the oft-cited neorosis. In Vicky Cristina, as the events play out in a tone pitched about ten degrees closer to comedy than tragedy, Allen mocks his girls for their illusions–harshly, at times, but not without sympathy. He’s been there. Call it autopilot, call it barrel scraping, but I believe he’s still really baffled about various unsolvable mysteries of human nature. The benefit of age may be that he’s finally boiled his issues down from prickly, all-encompassing nuerosis, into an almost elegantly restricted package of major questions about human nature that, after nearly 73 years on the planet, he still can’t figure out. And even if these later films themselves are inconsistently moving, I’m touched by the gesture itself, the taking stock of one’s own life-long search for meaning, the mistakes made along the way, and the frustrations of coming up empty. Whether hidden under sultry sun or cold British class conflict or the pretenses of New York intelligencia, there are traces in all of Allen’s later films of unforgiving moral comedowns, as could only be conjured by someone whose own moral stumbles have gone largely unforgiven. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/jjgittes/archive/2009/6/17/42693.aspx Post By: jjgittes
Post To: jjgittes Blog
Post Date: 6/17/2009 6:26:02 PM
Body: Quite simply, ANNIE HALL is one of my top ten favorite films of all time, even higher on the list than CASABLANCA, the other Reel 13 film this year to have that honor. It is a perfect, soaring example of “modernism lite” – a cinematic movement that borrowed creative filmmaking ideas from European Art Cinema, but made them more accessible by utilizing them within a traditional Hollywood-type narrative. Modernism lite made its debut stateside in the seventies with the rise of the film school generation. Other examples of this might include AMERICAN GRAFFITI, MEAN STREETS or THE CONVERSATION. ANNIE HALL also started a genre of its own to some degree, which I like to call the “neurotic romantic comedy”, which is mostly typified by the idea that the obstacles for couple in question is really just themselves and their own hang-ups and psychological issues. This is a tradition that filmmakers like Nora Ephron and company would continue many years later with films like WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE. In many ways, it is a truer and more honest representation of relationships as we know them in modern society and the comedy in these films derive from the audience recognizing themselves in the characters and the flaws in their own behavior. This is very different from traditional Hollywood romances in which the characters represented an ideal, something for the audience to admire and aspire to. Granted, none of us are quite as neurotic as Alvy and Annie are (though I may come close). They take the behavior to an extreme, but that only enhances the comedy. I think the element that is the most special about ANNIE HALL is the way it blends fantasy and reality. Early on, Allen comments that he always had a problem distinguishing the two and the results in the film are glorious. From the scene in which his eight year-old classmates stand to announce what they would grow up to become to when he and his friends would physically watch and then interact with flashbacks, these moments are high points in the film because they manage to not only provide exposition and character information, but they also comment and provide insight on the information in a way that feels very natural, kind of like drinking water to make a pill go down easier. Allen establishes this style from the get go and therefore, the transitions to his imagination never feel jarring. He handles them with a matter-of-factness for the rest of the way, which is fun, fascinating and also keeps the viewer on his or her toes. We are engaged. Diane Keaton won an Academy Award for her performance as the titular character and deservedly so. Woody Allen, at his most amusing and charismatic, is no slouch either. There has been much criticism over the years that Allen and Keaton merely played themselves, but to me, that holds little weight. While I concur that the characters were based on them, every actor needs to draw from their own experiences when approaching a performance. Here, what Allen and Keaton each do, transcends the advantage they had of living through a similar, real relationship. Their comic timing is masterful while never feeling contrived or sitcom-like. Their chemistry is natural and even though that’s probably due to their off-screen relationship, it’s still a joy to watch on-screen. They manage to make scenes with all those zingers feel honest and real, as if conversations any of us would have in real life. It’s not as easy as they make it look. In my opinion, they used themselves as a starting point, a springboard for crafting the performances that they did, but each of them added to that foundation so that the film would not still be fun and not just a home movie of their love affair. Of course, the other memorable quality to ANNIE HALL is the script, particularly the dialogue. Allen keeps most of the best quips for himself, but that never feels like too much because many of them are self-deprecating. Not only are the lines witty and well-delivered, but they have a resonance behind them. Many of them come from old jokes that Allen retells, turning them upside down to shake out the hidden meaning. Examples include the famous “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member” and “I need the eggs”. These moments or lines of dialogue are funny on the surface, but quite poignant underneath, offering insight into the nature of relationships and the characters we are watching while not hitting us over the head and still being interesting and entertaining. That’s a combination that serves the film as a whole and the result is an always surprisingly powerful experience. (For more information on this film or any other Reel 13 film, check out their website at www.reel13.com)
]]>Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:26:02 GMTjjgittesjjgittes Blog6/17/2009 6:26:02 PM Quite simply, ANNIE HALL is one of my top ten favorite films of all time, even higher on the list than CASABLANCA, the other Reel 13 film this year to have that honor. It is a perfect, soaring example of &ldquo;modernism lite&rdquo; &ndash; a cinematic movement that borrowed creative filmmaking ideas from European Art Cinema, but made them more accessible by utilizing them within a traditional Hollywood-type narrative. Modernism lite made its debut stateside in the seventies with the rise of the film school generation. Other examples of this might include AMERICAN GRAFFITI, MEAN STREETS or THE CONVERSATION. ANNIE HALL also started a genre of its own to some degree, which I like to call the &ldquo;neurotic romantic comedy&rdquo;, which is mostly typified by the idea that the obstacles for couple in question is really just themselves and their own hang-ups and psychological issues. This is a tradition that filmmakers like Nora Ephron and company would continue many years later with films like WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE. In many ways, it is a truer and more honest representation of relationships as we know them in modern society and the comedy in these films derive from the audience recognizing themselves in the characters and the flaws in their own behavior. This is very different from traditional Hollywood romances in which the characters represented an ideal, something for the audience to admire and aspire to. Granted, none of us are quite as neurotic as Alvy and Annie are (though I may come close). They take the behavior to an extreme, but that only enhances the comedy. I think the element that is the most special about ANNIE HALL is the way it blends fantasy and reality. Early on, Allen comments that he always had a problem distinguishing the two and the results in the film are glorious. From the scene in which his eight year-old classmates stand to announce what they would grow up to become to when he and his friends would physically watch and then interact with flashbacks, these moments are high points in the film because they manage to not only provide exposition and character information, but they also comment and provide insight on the information in a way that feels very natural, kind of like drinking water to make a pill go down easier. Allen establishes this style from the get go and therefore, the transitions to his imagination never feel jarring. He handles them with a matter-of-factness for the rest of the way, which is fun, fascinating and also keeps the viewer on his or her toes. We are engaged. Diane Keaton won an Academy Award for her performance as the titular character and deservedly so. Woody Allen, at his most amusing and charismatic, is no slouch either. There has been much criticism over the years that Allen and Keaton merely played themselves, but to me, that holds little weight. While I concur that the characters were based on them, every actor needs to draw from their own experiences when approaching a performance. Here, what Allen and Keaton each do, transcends the advantage they had of living through a similar, real relationship. Their comic timing is masterful while never feeling contrived or sitcom-like. Their chemistry is natural and even though that&rsquo;s probably due to their off-screen relationship, it&rsquo;s still a joy to watch on-screen. They manage to make scenes with all those zingers feel honest and real, as if conversations any of us would have in real life. It&rsquo;s not as easy as they make it look. In my opinion, they used themselves as a starting point, a springboard for crafting the performances that they did, but each of them added to that foundation so that the film would not still be fun and not just a home movie of their love affair. Of course, the other memorable quality to ANNIE HALL is the script, particularly the dialogue. Allen keeps most of the best quips for himself, but that never feels like too much because many of them are self-deprecating. Not only are the lines witty and well-delivered, but they have a resonance behind them. Many of them come from old jokes that Allen retells, turning them upside down to shake out the hidden meaning. Examples include the famous &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member&rdquo; and &ldquo;I need the eggs&rdquo;. These moments or lines of dialogue are funny on the surface, but quite poignant underneath, offering insight into the nature of relationships and the characters we are watching while not hitting us over the head and still being interesting and entertaining. That&rsquo;s a combination that serves the film as a whole and the result is an always surprisingly powerful experience. (For more information on this film or any other Reel 13 film, check out their website at www.reel13.com) http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/12/11/38235.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 12/11/2008 11:01:42 AM
Body: The fanboys are so serious about The Dark Knight being the best film of 2008 that if the Academy snubs the comic-book adaptation for a Best Picture nomination, they’re liable to storm the Kodak Theatre on February 22 in protest. But why should anyone be worried that it won’t get the nomination? It wouldn’t be much of a coup for the year’s top-grossing blockbuster to be named one of the five Best Picture candidates. In fact, since the very first Academy Awards, the top award has often been handed out to films that were #1 at the box office in their respective year. And the last time it happened was as recent as 2003, with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Thanks to popular and talented filmmakers like D.W. Griffith, Walt Disney, David Lean and Steven Spielberg, it’s hardly uncommon for films to make money and earn critical respect. But this isn’t an opportunity to spotlight overrated top-grossing Best Pictures like Titanic, Rain Man and Rocky, which were decidedly not their year’s best films. Rather, this is a chance to ease the minds of fanboys just in case The Dark Knight doesn’t get the nod. Some of these blockbusters were indeed nominated for Best Picture, and a few even won the award, but some of them were both their year’s biggest moneymaker (in the U.S.) and best film (from the U.S.) without gaining proper Academy recognition. 1937: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Domestic Gross: $66,596,803 It’s certainly not the best feature-length animated film from Disney. That would be the box office disappointment Pinocchio, which came out a few years later and revealed the true breadth of Uncle Walt’s magic. But this was the first, and it’s enchanting enough that it towers over even the best live-action films of its year, including The Awful Truth, The Life of Emile Zola and The Good Earth. 1946: The Best Years of Our Lives Domestic Gross: $11,300,000 If a film like this came out today, it would probably be ignored at the box office, just as most movies responding to the Iraq War and its effects have been box office poison. Yet The Best Years of Our Lives was a huge hit with moviegoers, and it was named Best Picture, too. If you haven’t seen it, you might think that its success had to do with the idea that movies were far more patriotic in tone then. But in reality, this film is more critical of post-wartime America and more supportive and revealing of veteran’s struggles than much of what Hollywood attempts now. 1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai Domestic Gross: $17,195,000 If you only knew the successes of Snow White and this film, you might think the best way to both box office and Oscar gold is to feature a song involving whistling. Unlike “Whistle While You Work,” however, the catchy tune in this film was a hit from decades earlier, and certain circumstances allowed it to add subtext, one of many elements that makes David Lean’s POW epic so rich and wonderful. Of course, it’s that widescreen mise-en-scene that really makes this film just barely edge out 12 Angry Men and Sweet Smell of Success to be considered the year’s finest Hollywood release. 1962: Lawrence of Arabia Domestic Gross: $20,310,000 Nothing against Christopher Nolan and his interest in making truly big-screen-appropriate blockbusters, but even if he does want to completely shoot his next movie for the IMAX format, he’ll never be as fit for 70mm as David Lean was. We all remember that famous shot of the rider in the distance who eventually approaches the foreground, but despite what’s written above for the River Kwai’s entry on this list, Lean wasn’t just good for widescreen spectacle. He could actually direct action pretty well, too, for starters. If only he’d lived long enough to have been forced to deliver his own superhero flick. 1965: Doctor Zhivago Domestic Gross: $60,954,000 Enough with the David Lean, right? This isn’t even that great a film, but the mid-60s weren’t a particularly good time in terms of Hollywood output. If you prefer, some sources place The Sound of Music as the year’s box office champ (its listed domestic take includes rerelease income), and there’s plenty who think that Best Picture-winner was the best film of 1965 instead (hi, Mom). 1972: The Godfather Domestic Gross: $86,691,000 It won the box office, it won the Academy Awards and it still has the utmost respect of film critics and fans today. Few people could honestly say there was a better film in 1972. Even the silly voters who allowed Bob Fosse to win Best Director for Cabaret that year probably wish they could go back and change their minds. 1980: The Empire Strikes Back Domestic Gross: $209,398,025 Argue all you want that 1977 deserves to be on this list, too, but both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Annie Hall are better films. Besides, anytime critics include the first Star Wars as one of the best films of all time, they actually depreciate the quality of its sequel. Putting that film in the same league with The Empire Strikes Back is like putting the 1966 Batman movie on equal standing with The Dark Knight. Okay, that’s overdoing it. Maybe like putting Batman Begins on the same level, then. 1981: Raiders of the Lost Ark Domestic Gross: $209,562,121 It’s terrible to have to include two George Lucas productions on this list, mainly because by 1999 he was putting out films that were their year’s top earners and top turkeys. Plus, thanks to the latest Indiana Jones movie, it’s a little tough to watch Raiders without thinking of how the protagonist will one day fly through the air in a nuked fridge. But it’s still a damn good action-adventure flick, arguably the greatest of all time. 1985: Back to the Future Domestic Gross: $210,609,762 Robert Zemeckis gets more credit for the double success of Forrest Gump because that film won Best Picture in addition to topping the box office in 1994. Yet it’s this top-grossing film that deserves more esteem. It may not have been nominated for Best Picture, but it captured the mid-80s’ hunger for science fiction and nostalgia perfectly, turning it into one of the most memorable films of the decade, and of all time. With all respect to Sydney Pollack and John Huston, does anyone even think of Out of Africa or Prizzi’s Honor much today? 1995: Toy Story Domestic Gross: $191,796,233 Compared to WALL-E, this film seems technically crude. It’s perhaps analogous to, in 1995, comparing Toy Story to Snow White. That’s how far it seems the wizards at Pixar have come in 13 years. But just as Disney’s first animated feature enchants us still to this day, Toy Story, far from being dated, has aged better than most of Hollywood’s films from the same year. If ever there was a year for a Pixar movie to be nominated for Best Picture, 1995 was the year. It was better than Braveheart, let alone Babe, then, and it’s better than those films now. That said, it would be just as interesting to see Braveheart 3-D next year along with the 3-D rerelease of Toy Story. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:01:42 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com12/11/2008 11:01:42 AMThe fanboys are so serious about The Dark Knight being the best film of 2008 that if the Academy snubs the comic-book adaptation for a Best Picture nomination, they’re liable to storm the Kodak Theatre on February 22 in protest. But why should anyone be worried that it won’t get the nomination? It wouldn’t be much of a coup for the year’s top-grossing blockbuster to be named one of the five Best Picture candidates. In fact, since the very first Academy Awards, the top award has often been handed out to films that were #1 at the box office in their respective year. And the last time it happened was as recent as 2003, with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Thanks to popular and talented filmmakers like D.W. Griffith, Walt Disney, David Lean and Steven Spielberg, it’s hardly uncommon for films to make money and earn critical respect. But this isn’t an opportunity to spotlight overrated top-grossing Best Pictures like Titanic, Rain Man and Rocky, which were decidedly not their year’s best films. Rather, this is a chance to ease the minds of fanboys just in case The Dark Knight doesn’t get the nod. Some of these blockbusters were indeed nominated for Best Picture, and a few even won the award, but some of them were both their year’s biggest moneymaker (in the U.S.) and best film (from the U.S.) without gaining proper Academy recognition. 1937: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Domestic Gross: $66,596,803 It’s certainly not the best feature-length animated film from Disney. That would be the box office disappointment Pinocchio, which came out a few years later and revealed the true breadth of Uncle Walt’s magic. But this was the first, and it’s enchanting enough that it towers over even the best live-action films of its year, including The Awful Truth, The Life of Emile Zola and The Good Earth. 1946: The Best Years of Our Lives Domestic Gross: $11,300,000 If a film like this came out today, it would probably be ignored at the box office, just as most movies responding to the Iraq War and its effects have been box office poison. Yet The Best Years of Our Lives was a huge hit with moviegoers, and it was named Best Picture, too. If you haven’t seen it, you might think that its success had to do with the idea that movies were far more patriotic in tone then. But in reality, this film is more critical of post-wartime America and more supportive and revealing of veteran’s struggles than much of what Hollywood attempts now. 1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai Domestic Gross: $17,195,000 If you only knew the successes of Snow White and this film, you might think the best way to both box office and Oscar gold is to feature a song involving whistling. Unlike “Whistle While You Work,” however, the catchy tune in this film was a hit from decades earlier, and certain circumstances allowed it to add subtext, one of many elements that makes David Lean’s POW epic so rich and wonderful. Of course, it’s that widescreen mise-en-scene that really makes this film just barely edge out 12 Angry Men and Sweet Smell of Success to be considered the year’s finest Hollywood release. 1962: Lawrence of Arabia Domestic Gross: $20,310,000 Nothing against Christopher Nolan and his interest in making truly big-screen-appropriate blockbusters, but even if he does want to completely shoot his next movie for the IMAX format, he’ll never be as fit for 70mm as David Lean was. We all remember that famous shot of the rider in the distance who eventually approaches the foreground, but despite what’s written above for the River Kwai’s entry on this list, Lean wasn’t just good for widescreen spectacle. He could actually direct action pretty well, too, for starters. If only he’d lived long enough to have been forced to deliver his own superhero flick. 1965: Doctor Zhivago Domestic Gross: $60,954,000 Enough with the David Lean, right? This isn’t even that great a film, but the mid-60s weren’t a particularly good time in terms of Hollywood output. If you prefer, some sources place The Sound of Music as the year’s box office champ (its listed domestic take includes rerelease income), and there’s plenty who think that Best Picture-winner was the best film of 1965 instead (hi, Mom). 1972: The Godfather Domestic Gross: $86,691,000 It won the box office, it won the Academy Awards and it still has the utmost respect of film critics and fans today. Few people could honestly say there was a better film in 1972. Even the silly voters who allowed Bob Fosse to win Best Director for Cabaret that year probably wish they could go back and change their minds. 1980: The Empire Strikes Back Domestic Gross: $209,398,025 Argue all you want that 1977 deserves to be on this list, too, but both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Annie Hall are better films. Besides, anytime critics include the first Star Wars as one of the best films of all time, they actually depreciate the quality of its sequel. Putting that film in the same league with The Empire Strikes Back is like putting the 1966 Batman movie on equal standing with The Dark Knight. Okay, that’s overdoing it. Maybe like putting Batman Begins on the same level, then. 1981: Raiders of the Lost Ark Domestic Gross: $209,562,121 It’s terrible to have to include two George Lucas productions on this list, mainly because by 1999 he was putting out films that were their year’s top earners and top turkeys. Plus, thanks to the latest Indiana Jones movie, it’s a little tough to watch Raiders without thinking of how the protagonist will one day fly through the air in a nuked fridge. But it’s still a damn good action-adventure flick, arguably the greatest of all time. 1985: Back to the Future Domestic Gross: $210,609,762 Robert Zemeckis gets more credit for the double success of Forrest Gump because that film won Best Picture in addition to topping the box office in 1994. Yet it’s this top-grossing film that deserves more esteem. It may not have been nominated for Best Picture, but it captured the mid-80s’ hunger for science fiction and nostalgia perfectly, turning it into one of the most memorable films of the decade, and of all time. With all respect to Sydney Pollack and John Huston, does anyone even think of Out of Africa or Prizzi’s Honor much today? 1995: Toy Story Domestic Gross: $191,796,233 Compared to WALL-E, this film seems technically crude. It’s perhaps analogous to, in 1995, comparing Toy Story to Snow White. That’s how far it seems the wizards at Pixar have come in 13 years. But just as Disney’s first animated feature enchants us still to this day, Toy Story, far from being dated, has aged better than most of Hollywood’s films from the same year. If ever there was a year for a Pixar movie to be nominated for Best Picture, 1995 was the year. It was better than Braveheart, let alone Babe, then, and it’s better than those films now. That said, it would be just as interesting to see Braveheart 3-D next year along with the 3-D rerelease of Toy Story. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/pippin06/archive/2008/10/27/36707.aspx Post By: pippin06
Post To: Reel Thoughts
Post Date: 10/27/2008 6:40:03 PM
Body: What's the AFI Project, you ask? For more information, or if you just enjoy my bemused ramblings, read here: http://www.spout.com/blogs/pippin06/archive/2008/3/1/25756.aspx Annie Hall is on the following AFI lists: The Original Top 100 (#31)100 Funniest Films (#4)100 Years...100 Passions (#11)100 Greatest Film Songs (#90 - "Seems Like Old Times")100 Movie Quotes (#55 - Annie Hall: "La-dee da, la-dee-da.")The Revised Top 100 (#35)10 Top 10's (#2 Romantic Comedy) I own Annie Hall (test = pass) because it is one of the most refreshing films to ever be made, by Woody Allen and, really, by anyone. I love this film because it gives no party a win, no one-up in the battle of the sexes, and provides no easy answers. There's not necessarily a happy ending, but it's not depressing either. In fact, many of the verbose analyses engaged in by the main characters, Annie herself (Diane Keaton) and Alvy SInger (Allen), seem real because they express universalisms that probably have applied to everyone at one point or another. The fictional license taken in Annie Hall is the fact that the topics of these self-analyses are being explored at one two hour pop covering the span of a relationship. Alvy Singer - a character too much like the real Mr. Allen to completely suspend disbelief - begins the movie by breaking the fourth wall, reminsicing to the audience about his relationship with free-spirit, yet oddly uptight, Annie Hall. Annie and Alvy are in every way mismatched, and the viewer knows it from the outset. In fact, Alvy practically spoon feeds the ending to the viewer right about the time he's making awkward, subtitled conversation with Annie on a Manhattan balcony, expressing how he doesn't like to be too different from his potential mates (or too similar for that matter). Alvy's Jewish; Annie's WASPy, with a classicly homespun yet anti-Semitic grandmother to boot. Alvy's prone to perspicacious and clearly neurotic verbal self-examination; Annie refuses to learn this tendency, even after Alvy starts paying for her to see a therapist (Alvy's already been seeing one for 15 years) and to take college courses (because, according to Annie, she's not smart enough for Alvy). Annie wants to try new experiences; Alvy's comfort center lies in the safety of routine. Unless it's sexual - and speak of that, Alvy was ready to go from the time he was 7, according to his clever exposition, while Annie needs to be "relaxed" by smoking grass prior to doing the deed. Alvy's twice divorced; Annie's experienced a string of casual partners. And the list goes on, yet the plot explores the chronology of this relationship and how, as mismatched as they may seem, Annie might be the one that got away from Alvy, if not for certain factors that doomed the relationship, including each individual's own unfair expectations. I love this movie because there's nothing really like it (truly) in Allen's catalogue, and there's no romantic comedy that has successfully copied the same delicate balance achieved by Mr. Allen here. This isn't the same predictable tripe that more recent romantic comedies rely upon - a happy-go-lucky, pseudo-replica of the screwball formula of before with the inevitable happy ending and possible wedding at the end. This also isn't the bluesier side of that formula, where the relationship is doomed, and the viewer is left with nothing else but to cry their eyes out at the perverse and divinely unfair injustice that befalls the star-crossed but doomed lovers at play. Annie Hall is light and airy, never succumbing to the vast pessimism to which Alvy/Woody is most prone, but is also touchingly deep and even a little sad when its protagonists achieve those glimmers of maturity and clarity that make them realize what they have and what they eventually lose. The bottom line is that this film is well written, well acted, and well directed. It's a formula creator, rather than a formula copier. Woody Allen achieved a level of maturity for himself with this film but also gave credibility to the male perspective when examining a true love relationship from both sides (including the male perspective of the female's side). Annie's faults and fortes are fairly represented, including her adventurous spirit, flexibility, and even her insecurities, so much so that I can relate to her very well, 30 years later. Diane Keaton is a joy to watch in this film as much as Mr. Allen because she becomes these personality traits and the woman donning them so completely (and, perhaps, the character had a trace of biographical context from Ms. Keaton's perspective, since she and Mr. Allen were an item for a time). Keaton won the Oscar for this flick too. The supporting cast was also wonderful, especially a brief but memorable appearance by Christopher Walken as Annie's slightly off brother. I also enjoyed Carol Kane as Alvy's first wife, Allison, and Shelley Duvall as a spaced-out but turned-on "transplendent" rock'n'roll fan with whom Alvy briefly flirts. Paul Simon has a substantial supporting role in this film, although he was less than convincing as a record producer interested in Annie's sultry singing. I liked all of the visual gaffes and tricks that Mr. Allen used in this movie. They're all clever and obvious yet never trite, which is where the refreshing part comes in. From addressing the camera at random and hilarious points, to split screens, subtitles, and my favorite sequence when Annie is not really "there" with Alvy while having sex, was an original and funny concept that makes me chuckle every time I watch the movie. And this film is funny - it makes me laugh out loud at several points because these characters, in the way that they are pretty similar after all, say the darndest things, out loud, that others might be thinking but would never say. Is it the fourth funniest film of all American cinema? I can't say and won't be able to until I start that list, though I have laughed at other films more that have lower rankings, including another ranked romantic comedy, The Philadelphia Story. That's neither here nor there at this point, though, because Annie Hall is still undeniably a laugh riot of its own accord. Plus, it's a perfect time capsule for the late half of the 70s and one of those quintessential love letters to New York City with the various shots of the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset, the seasonal shades of Central Park, and so on. Woody has a very good eye anyway, but it was used to best effect with Annie Hall in creating a background atmosphere to match the hazy nostalgia of Alvy's reflections. Plus, I'm told, it exemplified the cultural attitudes of the late 70s and made androgynous fashion cool for the first time. I guess some of the 80s can be blamed on Annie and Diane, then? Ok, maybe not. I love this movie lots, as you might be able to tell. It's not quite a masterpiece because there is a certain ham and cheese quality, whether in Woody Allen's particular brand of comedy or the tongue-in-cheek essence of the visual trickery, that prevents me from actually calling it a masterpiece. So, to me, it's one of those movies that can only be called a 9 for being perfectly entertaining because it is. At least when I'm finished watching it, I have a smile on my face, and I didn't notice any "flaws," real or imagined. The ending is bittersweet, but it's real, it's true, and you don't feel bad about it being real and true. You just feel glad that Alvy took the time to tell his story and to make you feel so many emotions, not the least of which includes joy and laughter. Annie Hall deserves its place in the various AFI lists in which it's ranked because it achieves that ethereal balance of entertainment and art that so few movies, in reality, actually do. Though, for the record, it did beat out Star Wars to win the Best Picture Oscar of 1977... I don't think I can agree, decades later, with that decision. Then again, how often can anyone agree with the Academy? Then again, I may be just a little biased.
]]>Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:40:03 GMTpippin06Reel Thoughts10/27/2008 6:40:03 PMWhat's the AFI Project, you ask? For more information, or if you just enjoy my bemused ramblings, read here: http://www.spout.com/blogs/pippin06/archive/2008/3/1/25756.aspx Annie Hall is on the following AFI lists: The Original Top 100 (#31)100 Funniest Films (#4)100 Years...100 Passions (#11)100 Greatest Film Songs (#90 - "Seems Like Old Times")100 Movie Quotes (#55 - Annie Hall: "La-dee da, la-dee-da.")The Revised Top 100 (#35)10 Top 10's (#2 Romantic Comedy) I own Annie Hall (test = pass) because it is one of the most refreshing films to ever be made, by Woody Allen and, really, by anyone. I love this film because it gives no party a win, no one-up in the battle of the sexes, and provides no easy answers. There's not necessarily a happy ending, but it's not depressing either. In fact, many of the verbose analyses engaged in by the main characters, Annie herself (Diane Keaton) and Alvy SInger (Allen), seem real because they express universalisms that probably have applied to everyone at one point or another. The fictional license taken in Annie Hall is the fact that the topics of these self-analyses are being explored at one two hour pop covering the span of a relationship. Alvy Singer - a character too much like the real Mr. Allen to completely suspend disbelief - begins the movie by breaking the fourth wall, reminsicing to the audience about his relationship with free-spirit, yet oddly uptight, Annie Hall. Annie and Alvy are in every way mismatched, and the viewer knows it from the outset. In fact, Alvy practically spoon feeds the ending to the viewer right about the time he's making awkward, subtitled conversation with Annie on a Manhattan balcony, expressing how he doesn't like to be too different from his potential mates (or too similar for that matter). Alvy's Jewish; Annie's WASPy, with a classicly homespun yet anti-Semitic grandmother to boot. Alvy's prone to perspicacious and clearly neurotic verbal self-examination; Annie refuses to learn this tendency, even after Alvy starts paying for her to see a therapist (Alvy's already been seeing one for 15 years) and to take college courses (because, according to Annie, she's not smart enough for Alvy). Annie wants to try new experiences; Alvy's comfort center lies in the safety of routine. Unless it's sexual - and speak of that, Alvy was ready to go from the time he was 7, according to his clever exposition, while Annie needs to be "relaxed" by smoking grass prior to doing the deed. Alvy's twice divorced; Annie's experienced a string of casual partners. And the list goes on, yet the plot explores the chronology of this relationship and how, as mismatched as they may seem, Annie might be the one that got away from Alvy, if not for certain factors that doomed the relationship, including each individual's own unfair expectations. I love this movie because there's nothing really like it (truly) in Allen's catalogue, and there's no romantic comedy that has successfully copied the same delicate balance achieved by Mr. Allen here. This isn't the same predictable tripe that more recent romantic comedies rely upon - a happy-go-lucky, pseudo-replica of the screwball formula of before with the inevitable happy ending and possible wedding at the end. This also isn't the bluesier side of that formula, where the relationship is doomed, and the viewer is left with nothing else but to cry their eyes out at the perverse and divinely unfair injustice that befalls the star-crossed but doomed lovers at play. Annie Hall is light and airy, never succumbing to the vast pessimism to which Alvy/Woody is most prone, but is also touchingly deep and even a little sad when its protagonists achieve those glimmers of maturity and clarity that make them realize what they have and what they eventually lose. The bottom line is that this film is well written, well acted, and well directed. It's a formula creator, rather than a formula copier. Woody Allen achieved a level of maturity for himself with this film but also gave credibility to the male perspective when examining a true love relationship from both sides (including the male perspective of the female's side). Annie's faults and fortes are fairly represented, including her adventurous spirit, flexibility, and even her insecurities, so much so that I can relate to her very well, 30 years later. Diane Keaton is a joy to watch in this film as much as Mr. Allen because she becomes these personality traits and the woman donning them so completely (and, perhaps, the character had a trace of biographical context from Ms. Keaton's perspective, since she and Mr. Allen were an item for a time). Keaton won the Oscar for this flick too. The supporting cast was also wonderful, especially a brief but memorable appearance by Christopher Walken as Annie's slightly off brother. I also enjoyed Carol Kane as Alvy's first wife, Allison, and Shelley Duvall as a spaced-out but turned-on "transplendent" rock'n'roll fan with whom Alvy briefly flirts. Paul Simon has a substantial supporting role in this film, although he was less than convincing as a record producer interested in Annie's sultry singing. I liked all of the visual gaffes and tricks that Mr. Allen used in this movie. They're all clever and obvious yet never trite, which is where the refreshing part comes in. From addressing the camera at random and hilarious points, to split screens, subtitles, and my favorite sequence when Annie is not really "there" with Alvy while having sex, was an original and funny concept that makes me chuckle every time I watch the movie. And this film is funny - it makes me laugh out loud at several points because these characters, in the way that they are pretty similar after all, say the darndest things, out loud, that others might be thinking but would never say. Is it the fourth funniest film of all American cinema? I can't say and won't be able to until I start that list, though I have laughed at other films more that have lower rankings, including another ranked romantic comedy, The Philadelphia Story. That's neither here nor there at this point, though, because Annie Hall is still undeniably a laugh riot of its own accord. Plus, it's a perfect time capsule for the late half of the 70s and one of those quintessential love letters to New York City with the various shots of the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset, the seasonal shades of Central Park, and so on. Woody has a very good eye anyway, but it was used to best effect with Annie Hall in creating a background atmosphere to match the hazy nostalgia of Alvy's reflections. Plus, I'm told, it exemplified the cultural attitudes of the late 70s and made androgynous fashion cool for the first time. I guess some of the 80s can be blamed on Annie and Diane, then? Ok, maybe not. I love this movie lots, as you might be able to tell. It's not quite a masterpiece because there is a certain ham and cheese quality, whether in Woody Allen's particular brand of comedy or the tongue-in-cheek essence of the visual trickery, that prevents me from actually calling it a masterpiece. So, to me, it's one of those movies that can only be called a 9 for being perfectly entertaining because it is. At least when I'm finished watching it, I have a smile on my face, and I didn't notice any "flaws," real or imagined. The ending is bittersweet, but it's real, it's true, and you don't feel bad about it being real and true. You just feel glad that Alvy took the time to tell his story and to make you feel so many emotions, not the least of which includes joy and laughter. Annie Hall deserves its place in the various AFI lists in which it's ranked because it achieves that ethereal balance of entertainment and art that so few movies, in reality, actually do. Though, for the record, it did beat out Star Wars to win the Best Picture Oscar of 1977... I don't think I can agree, decades later, with that decision. Then again, how often can anyone agree with the Academy? Then again, I may be just a little biased. http://www.spout.com/groups/Weekly_Theme/Re_Weekly_Theme_for_September_22_Breaking_the_Fou/625/35427/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: chrismorrell
Post To: Weekly Theme
Post Date: 9/23/2008 10:08:06 AM
Body: I dont know about first examples or whatever,but Groucho did it all the time didnt he?. Not so remarkable really 'coz they were a music hall (vaudeville) act. When the "filmspotting" podcasters talked about this a while back,one glaring omission was "A Clockwork Orange".."viddy well little brother" delivered to the camera as Alex is about to rape Adrienne Corri..in fact i think the very first shot is Malcolm McDowell staring insolently straight at "us".. A recent "all over the place" "fourth wall" "mockumentary" that comes to mind is "A Cock And Bull Story" ,with a great double act from Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon...untill the very end,on first viewing, Kelly MacDonald and Coogan were together and had a baby, as a far as knew. This film broke the "fifth" wall,let's say ,with the only slightly exaggerrated bickering between Coogan and Brydon extending to the radio and T.V. promotion.( That may have been real after all.!).Another instance that everyone will remember is Woody Allen ,in "Annie Hall" ,upbraiding the guy in the queue for the cinema,and bringing Marshall McLuhan ,the writer being mis-quoted, in to refute the argument.
]]>Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:08:06 GMTchrismorrellWeekly Theme9/23/2008 10:08:06 AMI dont know about first examples or whatever,but Groucho did it all the time didnt he?. Not so remarkable really 'coz they were a music hall (vaudeville) act. When the "filmspotting" podcasters talked about this a while back,one glaring omission was "A Clockwork Orange".."viddy well little brother" delivered to the camera as Alex is about to rape Adrienne Corri..in fact i think the very first shot is Malcolm McDowell staring insolently straight at "us".. A recent "all over the place" "fourth wall" "mockumentary" that comes to mind is "A Cock And Bull Story" ,with a great double act from Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon...untill the very end,on first viewing, Kelly MacDonald and Coogan were together and had a baby, as a far as knew. This film broke the "fifth" wall,let's say ,with the only slightly exaggerrated bickering between Coogan and Brydon extending to the radio and T.V. promotion.( That may have been real after all.!).Another instance that everyone will remember is Woody Allen ,in "Annie Hall" ,upbraiding the guy in the queue for the cinema,and bringing Marshall McLuhan ,the writer being mis-quoted, in to refute the argument. http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/8/14/34006.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 8/14/2008 11:01:06 AM
Body: To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them. To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that. The plot of Vicky Cristina –– like those of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point, the two Late Allen films it most resembles –– is barely more than a mechanism on which to hang Allen’s endless skepticism. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, a British girl doing naive but well-meaning Upper West Side academic) is going to Spain for the summer to stay with a family friend and work on a grad school thesis. It’s Vicky’s last summer before she gets married, and where another girl might be a bit more concerned with making the most of the last months of her sexual freedom, Vicky seems more preoccupied with the notion that the thesis represents her last chance at intellectual self-indulgence before her very sensible fiancee knocks her up and all vestiges of her identity as an independent woman must be put away. Vicky’s last minute escort on the trip is Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a wild child ball of blonde hair and bad decisions, who tags along to Barcelona to escape a bad break-up with hopes of finding her calling as an old-world romantic-creative. Thanks mainly to Cristina’s predatory eyes, the girls soon meet a painter, Juan Antonio, who they’ve heard has a torrid history with an ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). They let this smoldering artist at least 15 years their senior fly them to his hometown of Oviedo regardless of Vicky’s objections, and there the eager-to-bed Cristina comes down with food poisoning, leaving Vicky fall into Juan Antonio’s arms. But once the trio returns to Barcelona, order is restored: Juan and Cristina embark on the flagrantly cliche February-July muse-master relationship that always seemed in the cards, and Vicky dives back into her work and wedding plans. The status quo is interrupted once again when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria-Elena re-enters the picture, she and Cristina first fight over and then figure out a way to happily share the lucky Spaniard, and, as she continues to be haunted by a night that seems “unreal”, Vicky starts to wonder if her entire life plan is ill-conceived. If this sounds familiar, well, maybe we’ve hit on one of Late Allen’s easiest targets for criticism. Over and over again in this late career stretch, he’s rehearsing variations on the same preccupations: romance is fleeting, meaning and passion are both subjective and fluid; fate and luck are, in practice, basically the same thing; there are two types of fear: fear to act on our desires, and fear to do anything but. As Bardem’s character puts it at one point: “The trick is to enjoy life, and accept that it has no meaning.” This could be a direct quote from a number of recent Allen interviews, and it’s a sign of how seriously he’s invested in the essential existential question of the material: If none of it matters anyway, is it best to live impulsively and suffer disappointment, or take the safe, no thrills route, forsaking the manic highs in order to avoid the lowest lows? Another potentially valid, but only if unexamined, points of criticism almost always directed at Late Allen: in order to explore his pet themes from a distance, he seems to want to make his characters as shallow as possible. Speaking their lines with a flatness that almost approaches a read-aloud from high school English class, crowded into going through the motions of the dictates of an all-seeing narrator, the actors’ characterizations are, almost by default, mainly surface. Cruz has to do little more than look comfortable in the markedly “ethnic,” bag lady slut chic in which she’s dressed in order to put across Maria-Elena as an icon of the Scary/Sexy Exotic; Johansson, done up like a summer Gap ad loosely based on …And God Created Woman, basically just has to show up and Allen has the Narcissist Heartbreaker he needs in order to define, by contrast, Hall’s Frustrated Realist. (For all of the prudish questioning of the propriety of the Allen/ScarJo relationship, Vicky Cristina is evidence that Allen’s leering is at least a means to an end. Despite the limits of her character, Johansson is more present on screen here than I’ve seen her since Lost in Translation. He may love her, but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.) Rather than fault Allen for blatantly eschewing a realism that I don’t think was ever on his agenda to begin with, I think there’s something interesting about the falseness of it all–the unnecessary, didactic narration, the cliche personalities crashing into one another, and the very, very minor fissures that result. His point is taken: nothing ultimately, means anything, but in the moment, we forget that, and become convinced that inconsequential matters mean the world. Vicky Cristina Barcelona may be frivolous, but under the surface there’s a serious pondering of how the most frivolous things can temporarily cloud brains and hold otherwise reasonable people hostage, of how even a momentary giving over to impulse can slip an unignorable pea under the mattress of the best laid plans, of how sometimes functioning facades are shattered by a single slip of judgement over the course of a single night. Above all else, Vicky Cristina reveals that Allen is developing a late career style of distant, extremely expository satire of romantic givens. The American girls, smart and experienced though they think they are and even might be, are reduced to fools by their attraction to the Spanish painter. They remain consumed with the question of what their dalliances mean, convinced they must mean something, even after he’s told them repeatedly that nothing means anything. This is insanity defined—holding onto faith that something is true when all evidence would mark it as false–and it’s this lust-bred insanity that’s the more precise Allen theme than the oft-cited neorosis. In Vicky Cristina, as the events play out in a tone pitched about ten degrees closer to comedy than tragedy, Allen mocks his girls for their illusions–harshly, at times, but not without sympathy. He’s been there. Call it autopilot, call it barrel scraping, but I believe he’s still really baffled about various unsolvable mysteries of human nature. The benefit of age may be that he’s finally boiled his issues down from prickly, all-encompassing nuerosis, into an almost elegantly restricted package of major questions about human nature that, after nearly 73 years on the planet, he still can’t figure out. And even if these later films themselves are inconsistently moving, I’m touched by the gesture itself, the taking stock of one’s own life-long search for meaning, the mistakes made along the way, and the frustrations of coming up empty. Whether hidden under sultry sun or cold British class conflict or the pretenses of New York intelligencia, there are traces in all of Allen’s later films of unforgiving moral comedowns, as could only be conjured by someone whose own moral stumbles have gone largely unforgiven. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:01:06 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog8/14/2008 11:01:06 AM To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them. To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that. The plot of Vicky Cristina –– like those of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point, the two Late Allen films it most resembles –– is barely more than a mechanism on which to hang Allen’s endless skepticism. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, a British girl doing naive but well-meaning Upper West Side academic) is going to Spain for the summer to stay with a family friend and work on a grad school thesis. It’s Vicky’s last summer before she gets married, and where another girl might be a bit more concerned with making the most of the last months of her sexual freedom, Vicky seems more preoccupied with the notion that the thesis represents her last chance at intellectual self-indulgence before her very sensible fiancee knocks her up and all vestiges of her identity as an independent woman must be put away. Vicky’s last minute escort on the trip is Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a wild child ball of blonde hair and bad decisions, who tags along to Barcelona to escape a bad break-up with hopes of finding her calling as an old-world romantic-creative. Thanks mainly to Cristina’s predatory eyes, the girls soon meet a painter, Juan Antonio, who they’ve heard has a torrid history with an ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). They let this smoldering artist at least 15 years their senior fly them to his hometown of Oviedo regardless of Vicky’s objections, and there the eager-to-bed Cristina comes down with food poisoning, leaving Vicky fall into Juan Antonio’s arms. But once the trio returns to Barcelona, order is restored: Juan and Cristina embark on the flagrantly cliche February-July muse-master relationship that always seemed in the cards, and Vicky dives back into her work and wedding plans. The status quo is interrupted once again when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria-Elena re-enters the picture, she and Cristina first fight over and then figure out a way to happily share the lucky Spaniard, and, as she continues to be haunted by a night that seems “unreal”, Vicky starts to wonder if her entire life plan is ill-conceived. If this sounds familiar, well, maybe we’ve hit on one of Late Allen’s easiest targets for criticism. Over and over again in this late career stretch, he’s rehearsing variations on the same preccupations: romance is fleeting, meaning and passion are both subjective and fluid; fate and luck are, in practice, basically the same thing; there are two types of fear: fear to act on our desires, and fear to do anything but. As Bardem’s character puts it at one point: “The trick is to enjoy life, and accept that it has no meaning.” This could be a direct quote from a number of recent Allen interviews, and it’s a sign of how seriously he’s invested in the essential existential question of the material: If none of it matters anyway, is it best to live impulsively and suffer disappointment, or take the safe, no thrills route, forsaking the manic highs in order to avoid the lowest lows? Another potentially valid, but only if unexamined, points of criticism almost always directed at Late Allen: in order to explore his pet themes from a distance, he seems to want to make his characters as shallow as possible. Speaking their lines with a flatness that almost approaches a read-aloud from high school English class, crowded into going through the motions of the dictates of an all-seeing narrator, the actors’ characterizations are, almost by default, mainly surface. Cruz has to do little more than look comfortable in the markedly “ethnic,” bag lady slut chic in which she’s dressed in order to put across Maria-Elena as an icon of the Scary/Sexy Exotic; Johansson, done up like a summer Gap ad loosely based on …And God Created Woman, basically just has to show up and Allen has the Narcissist Heartbreaker he needs in order to define, by contrast, Hall’s Frustrated Realist. (For all of the prudish questioning of the propriety of the Allen/ScarJo relationship, Vicky Cristina is evidence that Allen’s leering is at least a means to an end. Despite the limits of her character, Johansson is more present on screen here than I’ve seen her since Lost in Translation. He may love her, but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.) Rather than fault Allen for blatantly eschewing a realism that I don’t think was ever on his agenda to begin with, I think there’s something interesting about the falseness of it all–the unnecessary, didactic narration, the cliche personalities crashing into one another, and the very, very minor fissures that result. His point is taken: nothing ultimately, means anything, but in the moment, we forget that, and become convinced that inconsequential matters mean the world. Vicky Cristina Barcelona may be frivolous, but under the surface there’s a serious pondering of how the most frivolous things can temporarily cloud brains and hold otherwise reasonable people hostage, of how even a momentary giving over to impulse can slip an unignorable pea under the mattress of the best laid plans, of how sometimes functioning facades are shattered by a single slip of judgement over the course of a single night. Above all else, Vicky Cristina reveals that Allen is developing a late career style of distant, extremely expository satire of romantic givens. The American girls, smart and experienced though they think they are and even might be, are reduced to fools by their attraction to the Spanish painter. They remain consumed with the question of what their dalliances mean, convinced they must mean something, even after he’s told them repeatedly that nothing means anything. This is insanity defined—holding onto faith that something is true when all evidence would mark it as false–and it’s this lust-bred insanity that’s the more precise Allen theme than the oft-cited neorosis. In Vicky Cristina, as the events play out in a tone pitched about ten degrees closer to comedy than tragedy, Allen mocks his girls for their illusions–harshly, at times, but not without sympathy. He’s been there. Call it autopilot, call it barrel scraping, but I believe he’s still really baffled about various unsolvable mysteries of human nature. The benefit of age may be that he’s finally boiled his issues down from prickly, all-encompassing nuerosis, into an almost elegantly restricted package of major questions about human nature that, after nearly 73 years on the planet, he still can’t figure out. And even if these later films themselves are inconsistently moving, I’m touched by the gesture itself, the taking stock of one’s own life-long search for meaning, the mistakes made along the way, and the frustrations of coming up empty. Whether hidden under sultry sun or cold British class conflict or the pretenses of New York intelligencia, there are traces in all of Allen’s later films of unforgiving moral comedowns, as could only be conjured by someone whose own moral stumbles have gone largely unforgiven. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/8/14/34005.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 8/14/2008 11:00:57 AM
Body: To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them. To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that. The plot of Vicky Cristina –– like those of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point, the two Late Allen films it most resembles –– is barely more than a mechanism on which to hang Allen’s endless skepticism. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, a British girl doing naive but well-meaning Upper West Side academic) is going to Spain for the summer to stay with a family friend and work on a grad school thesis. It’s Vicky’s last summer before she gets married, and where another girl might be a bit more concerned with making the most of the last months of her sexual freedom, Vicky seems more preoccupied with the notion that the thesis represents her last chance at intellectual self-indulgence before her very sensible fiancee knocks her up and all vestiges of her identity as an independent woman must be put away. Vicky’s last minute escort on the trip is Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a wild child ball of blonde hair and bad decisions, who tags along to Barcelona to escape a bad break-up with hopes of finding her calling as an old-world romantic-creative. Thanks mainly to Cristina’s predatory eyes, the girls soon meet a painter, Juan Antonio, who they’ve heard has a torrid history with an ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). They let this smoldering artist at least 15 years their senior fly them to his hometown of Oviedo regardless of Vicky’s objections, and there the eager-to-bed Cristina comes down with food poisoning, leaving Vicky fall into Juan Antonio’s arms. But once the trio returns to Barcelona, order is restored: Juan and Cristina embark on the flagrantly cliche February-July muse-master relationship that always seemed in the cards, and Vicky dives back into her work and wedding plans. The status quo is interrupted once again when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria-Elena re-enters the picture, she and Cristina first fight over and then figure out a way to happily share the lucky Spaniard, and, as she continues to be haunted by a night that seems “unreal”, Vicky starts to wonder if her entire life plan is ill-conceived. If this sounds familiar, well, maybe we’ve hit on one of Late Allen’s easiest targets for criticism. Over and over again in this late career stretch, he’s rehearsing variations on the same preccupations: romance is fleeting, meaning and passion are both subjective and fluid; fate and luck are, in practice, basically the same thing; there are two types of fear: fear to act on our desires, and fear to do anything but. As Bardem’s character puts it at one point: “The trick is to enjoy life, and accept that it has no meaning.” This could be a direct quote from a number of recent Allen interviews, and it’s a sign of how seriously he’s invested in the essential existential question of the material: If none of it matters anyway, is it best to live impulsively and suffer disappointment, or take the safe, no thrills route, forsaking the manic highs in order to avoid the lowest lows? Another potentially valid, but only if unexamined, points of criticism almost always directed at Late Allen: in order to explore his pet themes from a distance, he seems to want to make his characters as shallow as possible. Speaking their lines with a flatness that almost approaches a read-aloud from high school English class, crowded into going through the motions of the dictates of an all-seeing narrator, the actors’ characterizations are, almost by default, mainly surface. Cruz has to do little more than look comfortable in the markedly “ethnic,” bag lady slut chic in which she’s dressed in order to put across Maria-Elena as an icon of the Scary/Sexy Exotic; Johansson, done up like a summer Gap ad loosely based on …And God Created Woman, basically just has to show up and Allen has the Narcissist Heartbreaker he needs in order to define, by contrast, Hall’s Frustrated Realist. (For all of the prudish questioning of the propriety of the Allen/ScarJo relationship, Vicky Cristina is evidence that Allen’s leering is at least a means to an end. Despite the limits of her character, Johansson is more present on screen here than I’ve seen her since Lost in Translation. He may love her, but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.) Rather than fault Allen for blatantly eschewing a realism that I don’t think was ever on his agenda to begin with, I think there’s something interesting about the falseness of it all–the unnecessary, didactic narration, the cliche personalities crashing into one another, and the very, very minor fissures that result. His point is taken: nothing ultimately, means anything, but in the moment, we forget that, and become convinced that inconsequential matters mean the world. Vicky Cristina Barcelona may be frivolous, but under the surface there’s a serious pondering of how the most frivolous things can temporarily cloud brains and hold otherwise reasonable people hostage, of how even a momentary giving over to impulse can slip an unignorable pea under the mattress of the best laid plans, of how sometimes functioning facades are shattered by a single slip of judgement over the course of a single night. Above all else, Vicky Cristina reveals that Allen is developing a late career style of distant, extremely expository satire of romantic givens. The American girls, smart and experienced though they think they are and even might be, are reduced to fools by their attraction to the Spanish painter. They remain consumed with the question of what their dalliances mean, convinced they must mean something, even after he’s told them repeatedly that nothing means anything. This is insanity defined—holding onto faith that something is true when all evidence would mark it as false–and it’s this lust-bred insanity that’s the more precise Allen theme than the oft-cited neorosis. In Vicky Cristina, as the events play out in a tone pitched about ten degrees closer to comedy than tragedy, Allen mocks his girls for their illusions–harshly, at times, but not without sympathy. He’s been there. Call it autopilot, call it barrel scraping, but I believe he’s still really baffled about various unsolvable mysteries of human nature. The benefit of age may be that he’s finally boiled his issues down from prickly, all-encompassing nuerosis, into an almost elegantly restricted package of major questions about human nature that, after nearly 73 years on the planet, he still can’t figure out. And even if these later films themselves are inconsistently moving, I’m touched by the gesture itself, the taking stock of one’s own life-long search for meaning, the mistakes made along the way, and the frustrations of coming up empty. Whether hidden under sultry sun or cold British class conflict or the pretenses of New York intelligencia, there are traces in all of Allen’s later films of unforgiving moral comedowns, as could only be conjured by someone whose own moral stumbles have gone largely unforgiven. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:00:57 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com8/14/2008 11:00:57 AM To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them. To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that. The plot of Vicky Cristina –– like those of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point, the two Late Allen films it most resembles –– is barely more than a mechanism on which to hang Allen’s endless skepticism. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, a British girl doing naive but well-meaning Upper West Side academic) is going to Spain for the summer to stay with a family friend and work on a grad school thesis. It’s Vicky’s last summer before she gets married, and where another girl might be a bit more concerned with making the most of the last months of her sexual freedom, Vicky seems more preoccupied with the notion that the thesis represents her last chance at intellectual self-indulgence before her very sensible fiancee knocks her up and all vestiges of her identity as an independent woman must be put away. Vicky’s last minute escort on the trip is Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a wild child ball of blonde hair and bad decisions, who tags along to Barcelona to escape a bad break-up with hopes of finding her calling as an old-world romantic-creative. Thanks mainly to Cristina’s predatory eyes, the girls soon meet a painter, Juan Antonio, who they’ve heard has a torrid history with an ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). They let this smoldering artist at least 15 years their senior fly them to his hometown of Oviedo regardless of Vicky’s objections, and there the eager-to-bed Cristina comes down with food poisoning, leaving Vicky fall into Juan Antonio’s arms. But once the trio returns to Barcelona, order is restored: Juan and Cristina embark on the flagrantly cliche February-July muse-master relationship that always seemed in the cards, and Vicky dives back into her work and wedding plans. The status quo is interrupted once again when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria-Elena re-enters the picture, she and Cristina first fight over and then figure out a way to happily share the lucky Spaniard, and, as she continues to be haunted by a night that seems “unreal”, Vicky starts to wonder if her entire life plan is ill-conceived. If this sounds familiar, well, maybe we’ve hit on one of Late Allen’s easiest targets for criticism. Over and over again in this late career stretch, he’s rehearsing variations on the same preccupations: romance is fleeting, meaning and passion are both subjective and fluid; fate and luck are, in practice, basically the same thing; there are two types of fear: fear to act on our desires, and fear to do anything but. As Bardem’s character puts it at one point: “The trick is to enjoy life, and accept that it has no meaning.” This could be a direct quote from a number of recent Allen interviews, and it’s a sign of how seriously he’s invested in the essential existential question of the material: If none of it matters anyway, is it best to live impulsively and suffer disappointment, or take the safe, no thrills route, forsaking the manic highs in order to avoid the lowest lows? Another potentially valid, but only if unexamined, points of criticism almost always directed at Late Allen: in order to explore his pet themes from a distance, he seems to want to make his characters as shallow as possible. Speaking their lines with a flatness that almost approaches a read-aloud from high school English class, crowded into going through the motions of the dictates of an all-seeing narrator, the actors’ characterizations are, almost by default, mainly surface. Cruz has to do little more than look comfortable in the markedly “ethnic,” bag lady slut chic in which she’s dressed in order to put across Maria-Elena as an icon of the Scary/Sexy Exotic; Johansson, done up like a summer Gap ad loosely based on …And God Created Woman, basically just has to show up and Allen has the Narcissist Heartbreaker he needs in order to define, by contrast, Hall’s Frustrated Realist. (For all of the prudish questioning of the propriety of the Allen/ScarJo relationship, Vicky Cristina is evidence that Allen’s leering is at least a means to an end. Despite the limits of her character, Johansson is more present on screen here than I’ve seen her since Lost in Translation. He may love her, but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.) Rather than fault Allen for blatantly eschewing a realism that I don’t think was ever on his agenda to begin with, I think there’s something interesting about the falseness of it all–the unnecessary, didactic narration, the cliche personalities crashing into one another, and the very, very minor fissures that result. His point is taken: nothing ultimately, means anything, but in the moment, we forget that, and become convinced that inconsequential matters mean the world. Vicky Cristina Barcelona may be frivolous, but under the surface there’s a serious pondering of how the most frivolous things can temporarily cloud brains and hold otherwise reasonable people hostage, of how even a momentary giving over to impulse can slip an unignorable pea under the mattress of the best laid plans, of how sometimes functioning facades are shattered by a single slip of judgement over the course of a single night. Above all else, Vicky Cristina reveals that Allen is developing a late career style of distant, extremely expository satire of romantic givens. The American girls, smart and experienced though they think they are and even might be, are reduced to fools by their attraction to the Spanish painter. They remain consumed with the question of what their dalliances mean, convinced they must mean something, even after he’s told them repeatedly that nothing means anything. This is insanity defined—holding onto faith that something is true when all evidence would mark it as false–and it’s this lust-bred insanity that’s the more precise Allen theme than the oft-cited neorosis. In Vicky Cristina, as the events play out in a tone pitched about ten degrees closer to comedy than tragedy, Allen mocks his girls for their illusions–harshly, at times, but not without sympathy. He’s been there. Call it autopilot, call it barrel scraping, but I believe he’s still really baffled about various unsolvable mysteries of human nature. The benefit of age may be that he’s finally boiled his issues down from prickly, all-encompassing nuerosis, into an almost elegantly restricted package of major questions about human nature that, after nearly 73 years on the planet, he still can’t figure out. And even if these later films themselves are inconsistently moving, I’m touched by the gesture itself, the taking stock of one’s own life-long search for meaning, the mistakes made along the way, and the frustrations of coming up empty. Whether hidden under sultry sun or cold British class conflict or the pretenses of New York intelligencia, there are traces in all of Allen’s later films of unforgiving moral comedowns, as could only be conjured by someone whose own moral stumbles have gone largely unforgiven. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/groups/It_s_a_Wonderful_Night_for_Oscar/Re_AFI_s_100_Funniest_Comedy_and_the_Oscars_a/46/32709/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: pippin06
Post To: It's a Wonderful Night for Oscar!
Post Date: 7/18/2008 8:19:50 AM
Body: Oh yes, you're certainly right. I forgot about the American part. Though, there's lots of examples of when they bent those rules to include some films with American filmmakers or simply produced by American studios (such as Lawrence of Arabia). But I guess Monty Python doesn't qualify, even with bendy rules - which is good. Though Terry Gilliam is an American, and he was a co-director....but that's probably too bendy. I actually like Annie Hall. It makes me laugh more than any other Woody Allen film that I've seen, anyway. But I would look at that film being more of a comedy drama. As I would the Graduate (I didn't laugh at that film either!). So it seems the AFI didn't restrict their list exclusively to straight comedies. I think I want to be come a member, just to see how these films get chosen. [/quote] I guess there's just quite a mix on the list of movies for people with different senses of humor. [/quote] And that's what begs the topical questions. How do you rank films that have so many styles of sense of humor and say one is better than the other one? And I'm not just talking about the AFI. I'm talking about any list. Where does a ranking institution even begin, knowing that humor is so opinion-based, so varied by individual? I mean, lots of people clearly like Some Like It Hot, but it obviously does not have universal appeal on the comedy front. So, I'll start a poll, a la the Top 5 concept (stolen from the Top 5 group - thanks). What are the five funniest films you've ever seen, and explain why you chose them. I think this'll be an interesting experiment. Don't look at any lists. Just pick the five that strike your funny bone the most and tell us about them. I'll tally anything that gets the most votes. This will only work with participation. I'm going to think about mine for a bit, though I'm positive a Monty Python movie will make the cut (it'll be tough to choose between Holy Grail and the Life of Brian, but I'm thinking I might favor the former, just because I quote it all the time).
]]>Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:19:50 GMTpippin06It's a Wonderful Night for Oscar!7/18/2008 8:19:50 AMOh yes, you're certainly right. I forgot about the American part. Though, there's lots of examples of when they bent those rules to include some films with American filmmakers or simply produced by American studios (such as Lawrence of Arabia). But I guess Monty Python doesn't qualify, even with bendy rules - which is good. Though Terry Gilliam is an American, and he was a co-director....but that's probably too bendy. I actually like Annie Hall. It makes me laugh more than any other Woody Allen film that I've seen, anyway. But I would look at that film being more of a comedy drama. As I would the Graduate (I didn't laugh at that film either!). So it seems the AFI didn't restrict their list exclusively to straight comedies. I think I want to be come a member, just to see how these films get chosen. [/quote] I guess there's just quite a mix on the list of movies for people with different senses of humor. [/quote] And that's what begs the topical questions. How do you rank films that have so many styles of sense of humor and say one is better than the other one? And I'm not just talking about the AFI. I'm talking about any list. Where does a ranking institution even begin, knowing that humor is so opinion-based, so varied by individual? I mean, lots of people clearly like Some Like It Hot, but it obviously does not have universal appeal on the comedy front. So, I'll start a poll, a la the Top 5 concept (stolen from the Top 5 group - thanks). What are the five funniest films you've ever seen, and explain why you chose them. I think this'll be an interesting experiment. Don't look at any lists. Just pick the five that strike your funny bone the most and tell us about them. I'll tally anything that gets the most votes. This will only work with participation. I'm going to think about mine for a bit, though I'm positive a Monty Python movie will make the cut (it'll be tough to choose between Holy Grail and the Life of Brian, but I'm thinking I might favor the former, just because I quote it all the time). http://www.spout.com/groups/It_s_a_Wonderful_Night_for_Oscar/Re_AFI_s_100_Funniest_Comedy_and_the_Oscars_a/46/32696/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: Risselada
Post To: It's a Wonderful Night for Oscar!
Post Date: 7/17/2008 6:08:25 PM
Body: [quote user="pippin06"] I thought I'd revive this discussion, even though I am the only one who seems to have been having it. I just watched Some Like It Hot again (for the second time), and I'm still baffled as to why this gets top honors on AFI's Funniest List when it fails to make me laugh. I sort of chuckle at Jack Lemmon, but it's not the roll-on-the-ground-clutching-your-sides-type-funny you would expect it to be for such a high ranking, at least not to me (but I know I'm not the only one who feels this way). Which makes me wonder if I've even got it right. Is my sense of humor out of wack? Or do I not appreciate the finest sensibilities of art versus comedy? Can't comedy be an art form? If comedy can be artsy, does the artsy quality detract from the funny? What's the perfect balance? And is there a film that strikes it - and if that film is Some Like It Hot, let's talk about why. [/quote] I saw Some Like It Hot not too long ago as well, and was quite disappointed knowing it's reputation. I did not laugh too much. It was also my first Marilyn Monroe movie too, and I find her quite irritating. This is also now my least favorite Billy Wilder film I've seen. So I have no idea why it's number one on this list. There are a couple others high up on the list that I don't laugh at all either like The Graduate. Annie Hall and MASH don't really make me laugh out loud either. But then you get Airplane!, the Marx Brothers, and Mel Brooks films all up high on the list too, and those all make me laugh outloud almost constantly. And then of course there is Dr. Strangelove at #3 which is no only one of the most laugh out loud hilarious movies, it is also one of the greatest movies of all time in every other category as well. I guess there's just quite a mix on the list of movies for people with different senses of humor. [quote user="pippin06"] Here, Some Like It Hot is rated #4, while Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film I personally find gutbustingly hilarious is #1 (and that film never even made the AFI list!). [/quote] Well you seem to forget that this is the American Film Institute's list of America's Funniest Movies. Monty Python is 100% British so I don't think it counts. If we started letting those Brits and even those Canadians in we'd have a lot more to contend with.
]]>Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:08:25 GMTRisseladaIt's a Wonderful Night for Oscar!7/17/2008 6:08:25 PM[quote user="pippin06"] I thought I'd revive this discussion, even though I am the only one who seems to have been having it. I just watched Some Like It Hot again (for the second time), and I'm still baffled as to why this gets top honors on AFI's Funniest List when it fails to make me laugh. I sort of chuckle at Jack Lemmon, but it's not the roll-on-the-ground-clutching-your-sides-type-funny you would expect it to be for such a high ranking, at least not to me (but I know I'm not the only one who feels this way). Which makes me wonder if I've even got it right. Is my sense of humor out of wack? Or do I not appreciate the finest sensibilities of art versus comedy? Can't comedy be an art form? If comedy can be artsy, does the artsy quality detract from the funny? What's the perfect balance? And is there a film that strikes it - and if that film is Some Like It Hot, let's talk about why. [/quote] I saw Some Like It Hot not too long ago as well, and was quite disappointed knowing it's reputation. I did not laugh too much. It was also my first Marilyn Monroe movie too, and I find her quite irritating. This is also now my least favorite Billy Wilder film I've seen. So I have no idea why it's number one on this list. There are a couple others high up on the list that I don't laugh at all either like The Graduate. Annie Hall and MASH don't really make me laugh out loud either. But then you get Airplane!, the Marx Brothers, and Mel Brooks films all up high on the list too, and those all make me laugh outloud almost constantly. And then of course there is Dr. Strangelove at #3 which is no only one of the most laugh out loud hilarious movies, it is also one of the greatest movies of all time in every other category as well. I guess there's just quite a mix on the list of movies for people with different senses of humor. [quote user="pippin06"] Here, Some Like It Hot is rated #4, while Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film I personally find gutbustingly hilarious is #1 (and that film never even made the AFI list!). [/quote] Well you seem to forget that this is the American Film Institute's list of America's Funniest Movies. Monty Python is 100% British so I don't think it counts. If we started letting those Brits and even those Canadians in we'd have a lot more to contend with. http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/love/MemberTagFilms.aspxlove
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