list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Anything Else 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/Anything_Else/224062/default.aspx Title: Anything Else
Year: 2003
Director: Woody Allen
Plot: A young artist struggling with his career and his muse is getting more than a little aggravation from Cupid in this romantic comedy written and directed by Woody Allen. Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs) is a promising 21-year-old comedy writer living in New York City. While Jerry has talent, he's having a hard time getting his career off the ground, which might have something to do with the fact his agent Harvey (Danny DeVito) is a well-meaning, but ineffectual, blowhard, and his mentor David Dobel (Allen) is an increasingly paranoid eccentric whose twin careers as a teacher and standup comic are both floundering. Poised at the top of Jerry's mountain of anxieties is his relationship with his girlfriend Amanda (Christina Ricci); from the first moment he saw her, Jerry has been in love with her, but Amanda's multiple neuroses, fear of commitment, and frustrating intimacy issues make her all but impossible to be around. Jerry is approaching his breaking point when the small flat he shares with Amanda becomes home to a third roommate -- Amanda's mother Paula (Stockard Channing), who has decided to come to New York to chase her dream of becoming a cabaret singer. Anything Else also features supporting performances from Jimmy Fallon, William Hill, and jazz vocalist Diana Krall. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 19
Number of Lists: 13
Number of blog posts: 5
Number of discussion threads: 1
SpoutRating: 2
]]>Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:00:45 GMTAnything Else2003Woody AllenA young artist struggling with his career and his muse is getting more than a little aggravation from Cupid in this romantic comedy written and directed by <a href="/players/P____79388/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Woody Allen</a>. Jerry Falk (<a href="/players/P_____6156/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Jason Biggs</a>) is a promising 21-year-old comedy writer living in New York City. While Jerry has talent, he's having a hard time getting his career off the ground, which might have something to do with the fact his agent Harvey (<a href="/players/P____17602/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Danny DeVito</a>) is a well-meaning, but ineffectual, blowhard, and his mentor David Dobel (Allen) is an increasingly paranoid eccentric whose twin careers as a teacher and standup comic are both floundering. Poised at the top of Jerry's mountain of anxieties is his relationship with his girlfriend Amanda (<a href="/players/P____59916/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Christina Ricci</a>); from the first moment he saw her, Jerry has been in love with her, but Amanda's multiple neuroses, fear of commitment, and frustrating intimacy issues make her all but impossible to be around. Jerry is approaching his breaking point when the small flat he shares with Amanda becomes home to a third roommate -- Amanda's mother Paula (<a href="/players/P____12304/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Stockard Channing</a>), who has decided to come to New York to chase her dream of becoming a cabaret singer. Anything Else also features supporting performances from <a href="/players/P___301488/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Jimmy Fallon</a>, William Hill, and jazz vocalist Diana Krall. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide19Tag Target (>10)13512http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/t38444c90tr.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Anything_Else/224062/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/yinali/archive/2009/10/22/44226.aspx Post By: Yinali
Post To: Yinali Blog
Post Date: 10/22/2009 5:51:01 PM
Body: I seriously thought this was going to be about some romantic comedy we naturally see. I was SO wrong, in so many levels. This movie is about little psychos who can drain someone, a "life sucker" if you will. Some plot holes so-so in general. Woody Allen (always) makes it worth a watch.
]]>Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:51:01 GMTYinaliYinali Blog10/22/2009 5:51:01 PMI seriously thought this was going to be about some romantic comedy we naturally see. I was SO wrong, in so many levels. This movie is about little psychos who can drain someone, a "life sucker" if you will. Some plot holes so-so in general. Woody Allen (always) makes it worth a watch. 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/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/blogs/moviebabe/archive/2007/7/3/13005.aspx Post By: MovieBabe
Post To: MovieBabe Blog
Post Date: 7/3/2007 7:03:00 PM
Body: By Tricia Olszewski Woody Allen continues his long-running attempt to fool audiences into believing his latest movie differs in even the slightest substantive way from anything else he's done over the last decade and a half. Although Anything Else offers a small twist on his well-worn formula—for only the second time since Bullets Over Broadway, a male Allen lead isn't played by the auteur himself—you can't sit through this genial story of love 'n' loss without realizing that any tweak Allen offers at this point in his career is a distinction without a difference. With Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci cast as its central bickering urbanites, Anything Else can feel like a high-school production of Husbands and Wives. Allen does appear onscreen to proctor, playing mentor to Biggs' floundering comedy writer and offering two navel-gazing neurotics for the price of one. Jerry Falk (Biggs) meets fellow writer David Dobel (Allen) at a pitch meeting, and after being cornered into listening to Dobel's logorrheic theories on everything from therapy to the world's tensions, Jerry decides to confide in him about his faltering love life. The audience learns Jerry's story as Dobel does, in flashback: Already once married, Jerry is living with but not in love with Brooke (Kadee Strickland) when he meets his friend's girlfriend, Amanda (Ricci), on a double date. Naturally, Jerry is instantly taken with Amanda's passions for Billie Holiday and kayaking through rain forests. (When Jerry says he'd be interested in such a trip, Brooke looks at him quizzically and says, "You hate mosquitoes!" "I hate malaria," counters Jerry.) Naturally, Jerry and Amanda soon start an affair, break off their current relationships, and move in together. And naturally, trouble begins when Amanda turns out to be compulsive and frigid, although she's allegedly just too darn adorable for Jerry to give up on her. Jerry's inability to cut off relationships also extends to his professional life, as he stays loyal against all advice to his nutty and seemingly inept agent, Harvey (Danny DeVito). American Pie vet Biggs stammers valiantly and is surprisingly palatable as the nihilistic, doubting Jerry, though his puppy-brown eyes and smooth face undercut his credibility: The wire-frame glasses and middle-aged facility at self-analysis hardly convince you that someone so young could already have been through the wringer of marriage and then another serious relationship. Ricci also does neurotic well, though her tinny impersonation of a high-strung princess quickly grates. And despite recurrent statements by Jerry and others about how "men go instantly crazy" over Amanda, Ricci's wide-eyed moon-face falls well short of alluring. Ultimately, she doesn't quite cut it as a New York cynic who makes the customary Allen reference to Sartre—in this case, giving Jerry a book of his wisdom as an anniversary present. Allen himself is better: Even though Dobel is inarguably a vanity role, his aggressiveness foils nicely against Jerry's self-effacing uncertainty. And Dobel's paranoia serves both comically (as when he tries to make Jerry a comrade in fear by helping him put together a disaster-survival kit, including a rifle and floating flashlight) and as a moral, his chatter distilling into a dictum about the importance of self-preservation when involved in destructive relationships. In fact, despite the overfamiliar Allen tics (credits, as always, are white-on-black accompanied by old-tyme music) and frequent lulls (a turn by Stockard Channing as Amanda's mom is shrill and pointless), Anything Else is often surprisingly amusing and smart, scoring with witty dialogue about sex, jazz, and existentialism, not to mention the odd LOL scene—such as a perfectly played exchange by Biggs and DeVito in which a dreaded conversation between timid client and lousy manager leads to a comically heart-clutching, rage-fueled overreaction. Fans weary of Allen's schtick, however, shouldn't be misled by the film's title: If you're still going to see Woody Allen movies, you've had years of warning that you shouldn't expect anything else.
]]>Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:03:00 GMTMovieBabeMovieBabe Blog7/3/2007 7:03:00 PM By Tricia Olszewski Woody Allen continues his long-running attempt to fool audiences into believing his latest movie differs in even the slightest substantive way from anything else he's done over the last decade and a half. Although Anything Else offers a small twist on his well-worn formula&mdash;for only the second time since Bullets Over Broadway, a male Allen lead isn't played by the auteur himself&mdash;you can't sit through this genial story of love 'n' loss without realizing that any tweak Allen offers at this point in his career is a distinction without a difference. With Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci cast as its central bickering urbanites, Anything Else can feel like a high-school production of Husbands and Wives. Allen does appear onscreen to proctor, playing mentor to Biggs' floundering comedy writer and offering two navel-gazing neurotics for the price of one. Jerry Falk (Biggs) meets fellow writer David Dobel (Allen) at a pitch meeting, and after being cornered into listening to Dobel's logorrheic theories on everything from therapy to the world's tensions, Jerry decides to confide in him about his faltering love life. The audience learns Jerry's story as Dobel does, in flashback: Already once married, Jerry is living with but not in love with Brooke (Kadee Strickland) when he meets his friend's girlfriend, Amanda (Ricci), on a double date. Naturally, Jerry is instantly taken with Amanda's passions for Billie Holiday and kayaking through rain forests. (When Jerry says he'd be interested in such a trip, Brooke looks at him quizzically and says, "You hate mosquitoes!" "I hate malaria," counters Jerry.) Naturally, Jerry and Amanda soon start an affair, break off their current relationships, and move in together. And naturally, trouble begins when Amanda turns out to be compulsive and frigid, although she's allegedly just too darn adorable for Jerry to give up on her. Jerry's inability to cut off relationships also extends to his professional life, as he stays loyal against all advice to his nutty and seemingly inept agent, Harvey (Danny DeVito). American Pie vet Biggs stammers valiantly and is surprisingly palatable as the nihilistic, doubting Jerry, though his puppy-brown eyes and smooth face undercut his credibility: The wire-frame glasses and middle-aged facility at self-analysis hardly convince you that someone so young could already have been through the wringer of marriage and then another serious relationship. Ricci also does neurotic well, though her tinny impersonation of a high-strung princess quickly grates. And despite recurrent statements by Jerry and others about how "men go instantly crazy" over Amanda, Ricci's wide-eyed moon-face falls well short of alluring. Ultimately, she doesn't quite cut it as a New York cynic who makes the customary Allen reference to Sartre&mdash;in this case, giving Jerry a book of his wisdom as an anniversary present. Allen himself is better: Even though Dobel is inarguably a vanity role, his aggressiveness foils nicely against Jerry's self-effacing uncertainty. And Dobel's paranoia serves both comically (as when he tries to make Jerry a comrade in fear by helping him put together a disaster-survival kit, including a rifle and floating flashlight) and as a moral, his chatter distilling into a dictum about the importance of self-preservation when involved in destructive relationships. In fact, despite the overfamiliar Allen tics (credits, as always, are white-on-black accompanied by old-tyme music) and frequent lulls (a turn by Stockard Channing as Amanda's mom is shrill and pointless), Anything Else is often surprisingly amusing and smart, scoring with witty dialogue about sex, jazz, and existentialism, not to mention the odd LOL scene&mdash;such as a perfectly played exchange by Biggs and DeVito in which a dreaded conversation between timid client and lousy manager leads to a comically heart-clutching, rage-fueled overreaction. Fans weary of Allen's schtick, however, shouldn't be misled by the film's title: If you're still going to see Woody Allen movies, you've had years of warning that you shouldn't expect anything else. http://www.spout.com/groups/Totally_Over_rated/Your_overrated_list/170/4033/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: Risselada
Post To: Totally Over-rated
Post Date: 12/5/2006 4:50:55 PM
Body: Swingers's detail pageI thought I wouldn't like participating in this group at first because it get's frustrating complaining about movies, but I can't seem to hold myself back. Puhnner, you asked me to list some of my overrated movies, referring to my definition of overrated by ratio. Well I'm not sure if this is going by the same criteria, but I've come up with a list from another source. I also rate movies at the website movielens. It will give you recommendations based on your ratings and whatnot. It also gives some interesting statistics. For one, it tells me which movies I have rated the lowest compared to the average rating on their site. So I have looked at that list and picked several of them. The thing about this method is that I am not using what my impression of the ammount of acclaim a movie has received for the ratio but rather what the ammount of acclaim a website thinks a movie has based on the votes from it's users. Some of these movies I have not seen for a long time, so my feelings about them are not as immediate in my memory, but maybe it will give some dicussion. I Am SamShrekThe CoolerCrash (2005)In AmericaSelenaMillion Dollar BabyThe Wedding SingerChungking ExpressThe Lion KingEmpire RecordsAnything ElseMeet The ParentsTrue LiesBreathlessThe Nutty Professor (1996)Bad Boys IIJules and JimOpen WaterWhale RiderAmerican PieToy Story10 Things I Hate About YouSwingersGrand CanyonRuthless PeopleHappy, TexasWhat the #$*! Do We Know?!BanditsA Fish Called WandaThe Whole Nine YardsHigh FidelityMen In Black IIVanilla SkyE.T.The GameThe Truman ShowLiar LiarFahrenheit 9/11CollateralMeet the FockersField of DreamsLawrence of ArabiaBig DaddyThe GraduateHaiku TunnelAlien Vs. PredatorArlington RoadLa Femme NikitaGladiatorThe Motorcycle Diaries Also, I have added the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to the overrated list for this group. I also want to say I often hope my list in this area will stay short. Many of these movies I have had an impression from the start that I would not like it. I usually have a good sense ahead of time about what movies I will like more or less. I can't tell exactly how much I will like a movie, but I'm usually pretty close on the general range of how much I may like it. Most of these movies I was coerced into seeing. Some of you may argue that the fact that I told myself I didn't want to see it in the first place may have had an effect on how much I liked it. Such as if I go in telling myself I won't like it, I'll probably find more reasons not to like it. That may be true to some extent, but not enough to really effect my decision that much. Go ahead and ask me about these selections and make a list of your own using whatever criteria you feel is appropriate.
]]>Tue, 05 Dec 2006 21:50:55 GMTRisseladaTotally Over-rated12/5/2006 4:50:55 PM<a href='http://www.spout.com/films/Swingers/93403/default.aspx'>Swingers's detail page</a>I thought I wouldn't like participating in this group at first because it get's frustrating complaining about movies, but I can't seem to hold myself back. Puhnner, you asked me to list some of my overrated movies, referring to my definition of overrated by ratio. Well I'm not sure if this is going by the same criteria, but I've come up with a list from another source. I also rate movies at the website movielens. It will give you recommendations based on your ratings and whatnot. It also gives some interesting statistics. For one, it tells me which movies I have rated the lowest compared to the average rating on their site. So I have looked at that list and picked several of them. The thing about this method is that I am not using what my impression of the ammount of acclaim a movie has received for the ratio but rather what the ammount of acclaim a website thinks a movie has based on the votes from it's users. Some of these movies I have not seen for a long time, so my feelings about them are not as immediate in my memory, but maybe it will give some dicussion. I Am SamShrekThe CoolerCrash (2005)In AmericaSelenaMillion Dollar BabyThe Wedding SingerChungking ExpressThe Lion KingEmpire RecordsAnything ElseMeet The ParentsTrue LiesBreathlessThe Nutty Professor (1996)Bad Boys IIJules and JimOpen WaterWhale RiderAmerican PieToy Story10 Things I Hate About YouSwingersGrand CanyonRuthless PeopleHappy, TexasWhat the #$*! Do We Know?!BanditsA Fish Called WandaThe Whole Nine YardsHigh FidelityMen In Black IIVanilla SkyE.T.The GameThe Truman ShowLiar LiarFahrenheit 9/11CollateralMeet the FockersField of DreamsLawrence of ArabiaBig DaddyThe GraduateHaiku TunnelAlien Vs. PredatorArlington RoadLa Femme NikitaGladiatorThe Motorcycle Diaries Also, I have added the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to the overrated list for this group. I also want to say I often hope my list in this area will stay short. Many of these movies I have had an impression from the start that I would not like it. I usually have a good sense ahead of time about what movies I will like more or less. I can't tell exactly how much I will like a movie, but I'm usually pretty close on the general range of how much I may like it. Most of these movies I was coerced into seeing. Some of you may argue that the fact that I told myself I didn't want to see it in the first place may have had an effect on how much I liked it. Such as if I go in telling myself I won't like it, I'll probably find more reasons not to like it. That may be true to some extent, but not enough to really effect my decision that much. Go ahead and ask me about these selections and make a list of your own using whatever criteria you feel is appropriate. http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/comedy/MemberTagFilms.aspxcomedy
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Number of people who tagged: 3

Number of times used: 3

]]>Sat, 05 Jan 2008 03:09:59 GMT333Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/wonder/MemberTagFilms.aspxwonder
Number of films tagged: 3

Number of people who tagged: 3

Number of times used: 3

]]>Sun, 01 Apr 2007 21:44:54 GMT333Tag