I'm not watching this trailer, but I figured some of you might want to take a look. I'll definitely be buying a ticket. As I said in the FDT recently: the Allen, Stone, and Phoenix collaboration is a very exciting prospect. I also like what little I've heard about it (after stumbling across impressions of the trailer).
This is premiering at Cannes and then opening in North America on July 17th.
Last edited by Gittes; 04-30-2015 at 04:00 AM.
I can't wait until this thread inevitably overtakes the page number count of the Mad Max, Star Wars, and comic book movie threads, etc. Looking forward to all the anticipatory remarks and discussion.
Interested to see Woody Allen's take on the premise of a neurotic intellectual sleeping with a much younger woman.
Not sure if more examples of match-cut's propensity for pithy cynicism is better than nothing, but OK.
I'm not sure hectoring others on their choice of response is going to help in that respect.
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(90+ = canonical, 80-89 = brilliant, 70-79 = strongly recommended, 60-69 = good, 50-59 = mixed, 40-49 = below average with some good points, 30-39 = poor, 20-29 = bad, 10-19 = terrible, 0-9 = soul-crushingly inept in every way)
Run (2020) 64
The Whistlers (2019) 55
Pawn (2020) 62
Matilda (1996) 37
The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) 61
Moby Dick (2011) 50
Soul (2020) 64
Heroic Duo (2003) 55
A Moment of Romance (1990) 61
As Tears Go By (1988) 65
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Oh, lovely. Putting most of this in spoiler tags because it's obviously tangential.
[]
I'm not saying Winston* matches your particular "talents," though. I get he was just making a joke, and that's fine, but I was hoping for something else, I guess. With my first reply, I was just trying to encourage a few responses to the trailer and get a sense of how many Allen fans actually frequent this forum. But even that first reply was kind of cynical so I could have put it a different way. Sorry if my third post seemed harsh, Winston, but I'm just burnt out on this stuff.
Last edited by Gittes; 05-01-2015 at 03:40 AM.
I could expand by saying that when you're publicly accused of child molestation, it strikes me as unseemly to immediately return yet again to this particular well. Would that make me less cynical?
This thread already has twice as many posts as my Tale of Tales thread. Be happy, Gittes.
No offense, Gittes, but I think you may be a little more into our relationship than I am. I hope we can still be friends.
Last 10 Movies Seen
(90+ = canonical, 80-89 = brilliant, 70-79 = strongly recommended, 60-69 = good, 50-59 = mixed, 40-49 = below average with some good points, 30-39 = poor, 20-29 = bad, 10-19 = terrible, 0-9 = soul-crushingly inept in every way)
Run (2020) 64
The Whistlers (2019) 55
Pawn (2020) 62
Matilda (1996) 37
The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) 61
Moby Dick (2011) 50
Soul (2020) 64
Heroic Duo (2003) 55
A Moment of Romance (1990) 61
As Tears Go By (1988) 65
Stuff at Letterboxd
Listening Habits at LastFM
Ah, more deflections, feigned apathy, etc. Naturally. I already anticipated that, among other things, in my post. It's like you think your only recourse is to try and make it about the other person who is calling you out on demonstrably stupid behaviour, which is craven and silly (it also reads as: "lol, you care too much about how people communicate and stuff. let me be an asshole. k bye. lol."). So, not surprising. I'm not bowled over by the maturity and intellect on display. Given some of the reputation points I received from the posts I made in response to your previous bit of drive-by derision, I gather that there might be other people who similarly find that kind of nonsense pretty obnoxious.
Anyway, to be honest, I would rather this be our very last communication. I'll have to do my best to ignore you, especially if you decide to continue to make unnecessarily bitter, deeply stupid remarks and/or put down users for the "crime" of enthusiastically participating in a forum about movies, etc.
I mean, I already took an extended break from match-cut a while back because of asshole behaviour, only to return and discover yet another jerk. It's preferable if I don't have these kinds of conversations when I visit these forums, as it's not part of the appeal for me (does this place have an ignore option? Might prove useful). That would be ideal.
Last edited by Gittes; 05-01-2015 at 06:02 PM.
I'm not sure what your deal is, but Allen's recent movies have been pathetic. I'm not all that eager to give the guy who made that fucking clairvoyant thing another chance.
This looks... ok. Although Allen certainly helped popularize this genre, I'm interested in whether the voiceovers in the trailer (from Phoenix and Stone) are replicated in the film. If so, it'll feel something like Listen Up Phillip and Bogosian's dry narrator there, albeit problematized by the seeming power dynamic that others have noticed (some universities have tried to legislate in their by-laws that faculty aren't to get together with undergraduate students at any cost, an act of legislation that I agree with). As a result, this story is troubling if Stone's going to turn into a romantic partner. That's the kind of pairing that belongs to a more naive climate of screenwriting.
I say all this, of course, while excited by the idea of Phoenix in an Allen film, and paired up with Stone in general. I doubt I'll see a comedy any better than Love and Death, which is 100% my idea of comedy and structure, and something I try to watch once every couple years. I like Allen's films, and while I haven't seen everything from him in the past five-six years, his good stuff is fine. At worst, it'll be just ok, hopefully, and still worth a rental.
All this to say, if this didn't have the Stone angle, I suspect people would be more interested in it...
The Boat People - 9
The Power of the Dog - 7.5
The King of Pigs - 7
I'm a fan of Allen's films, and this mostly includes his recent ones (I haven't seen everything, though). I even liked Magic in the Moonlight (I don't think it's amazing or anything, but I liked it; I wrote about it in its thread). This doesn't warrant a comment like "I'm not sure what your deal is." To state the obvious: not everyone will match your personal appraisals of movies.Quoting Grouchy (view post)
Last edited by Gittes; 05-03-2015 at 07:14 PM.
Love and Death is one of the ones I haven't seen. Given your high praise, I'll have to make it a priority.
"I really like this charming trailer for a movie I'd love to see that was written and directed by an alleged pedophile," I say to myself.
Movie Theater Diary
A Short List of Mr Allen's Crimes Against the Irish (That'd Be Me)
Allen's got this insane work ethic but he has no internal editor, and nobody to tell him "no" except European bean counters and the occasional agent. So instead of pumping out scripts and producing every 5th one, like a reasonable pro, he makes them all. Nobody has that much to say that is that interesting.
His insights and observations are, at this point, bland. He's making the same kind of movies now as he was in 1985 and that seems wildly out of touch with the larger culture, especially after 9/11 and Occupy Wall Street. If I want to tap into the concerns of petty bourgeois living in New York, in a format that seems trapped in time, I will stream an episode of Friends. It's the same milquetoast, quasi-sentimental style of humor. If I feel more collegiate, I'll pick up an F Scott Fitzgerald novel. Or, fuck it, JD Salinger in The New Yorker.
As an artist, he stopped growing. He hit a certain stride with Hannah and Her Sisters, but after that, he floundered. Personally, I think his divorce (and subsequent scandal) (and subsequent Orion bankruptcy) ruined him. But more than that, I've long suspected the greats have about a ten year run where they are truly great. Allen's was about 1975-1985. Another ten years and we get stuff like Shadows and Fog and Celebrity and movies that seem unfocused, coming from another middle aged guy with nothing specific to say about anything.
Comedy is a tricky business and it is often rooted to a specific age, and it ages badly. Nobody reads Mencken or Perlman anymore, and few revisit the Hope and Crosby road pictures. Allen got lapped by guys like Whit Stillman and Wes Anderson (who covered his turf but with a more modern sensibility) and Allen never realized it. In arts, if you don't adapt, you die.
If you see him in interviews, he's smart and quietly funny (the antithesis of his movie persona). What I don't get is how a man with his intelligence and working life never matured. As a person. His concerns are stuck in an undergraduate's worldview. (Yes, please, name drop Nietzche and Kant as if that alone makes this scene esoteric and interesting.) The observations he made about life and intelligentsia and love haven't changed at all since Annie Hall and Manhattan. How is that possible in a thinking human being? It's so shallow.
As a director, his style never matured either. Because he's famously worked most of his career at low budgets, I get the sense he's reticent to push his actors (especially in the last ten or twenty years) to anyplace beyond where they think they could go. Like if sombody turns out a good performance in a Woody Allen film, they brought that with them. He didn't get it out of them.
His personal life makes my skin crawl.
(I hope all that's coherent. I am super bored & avoiding work & typing this on my phone).
This is all really well put. And there's certainly nothing in the Irrational Man trailer that speaks to me. The performers are likable but it's painfully obvious they're going to be trapped in Allen's very small bubble of concerns and emotions. The accusations regarding his personal life have, at least for me, revealed really what a one-trick pony the guy is and put a heavily negative light on even his classic movies (Annie Hall, Manhattan) through their gender politics.
I think you're absolutely right about not pushing actors creatively. I wish I could remember who told it, but I heard an actor tell a story about working with Allen and I really love it. They're on set, doing the scene, and the actor is having a little problem with getting the right emotion out of the moment. They've done several takes and he just can't quite connect. Allen calls "cut" and starts to walk over to the actor. In his head, the actor's thinking, "Oh boy, here's my Woody Allen moment! He's going to come over, put his hand on my shoulder, and say something that will completely change my perception of the scene and everything will click. I'm about to be directed by Woody Allen!"
Allen walks up, looks at his watch, looks back up at the actor and says, "So, uh, the Knicks play at 7. Do you think you could speed this up?"
Clearly not super concerned about performance...
last four:
black widow - 8
zero dark thirty - 9
the muse - 7
freaky - 7
now reading:
lonesome dove - larry mcmurtry
Letterboxd
The Harrison Marathon - A Podcast About Harrison Ford
I heard that from Allen himself. He has admitted as much in interviews that he doesn't like long shoots.
He prioritizes seeing a Knicks game to getting a scene right and likes to be home for dinner, so he will always shoot the same way: lots of conventional wide-to-medium coverage and long takes, to speed things up. He says he just trusts his casting instinct and basically believes that the right person in the role is good enough.
Blanchette said that while shooting Blue Jasmine, they had very minimal conversation, and he would give her more general direction like "The audience is bored, do it better" or something like that.
Movie Theater Diary
Ha, that is a great story.
To 8's point, the moment of truth came when I watched some featurette on Blue Jasmine. It wasn't as detailed as the story you related, but the overall feeling was very much okay let's get the scene down and move onto the next thing.
Edit to add: He almost has to do it that way because his budgets & box office are so slim, but on the other hand you won't get the collective creativity a great film needs in that kind of environment (eapecially because no actor will rewrite Woody Allen on the fly).
What I think is most telling is that, outside a few notable instances, most of the actors who work with him don't work with him more than once.
Last edited by Irish; 05-05-2015 at 05:46 PM.
Yeah, there's nothing inherently wrong with that and certainly some directors are accused of the opposite, over-directing, over-shooting, and making the process more arduous and time-consuming than it might need to be. Just illuminating to hear about Allen's process and its contrast to what we hear about someone like Fincher or Kubrick.
last four:
black widow - 8
zero dark thirty - 9
the muse - 7
freaky - 7
now reading:
lonesome dove - larry mcmurtry
Letterboxd
The Harrison Marathon - A Podcast About Harrison Ford
During the press tour for Magic in the Moonlight, Colin Firth and Emma Stone both acknowledged that they were aware of his reputation for minimal direction but argued that, in their experience, this actually wasn't the case. It's true that Blanchett (no "e" at the end) commented on this around the time of Blue Jasmine's release. In the interest of being more specific, here are some quotes (here are the sources: 1, 2 and 3).
And here's Allen commenting on how his approach with actors has changed over the years:
Last edited by Gittes; 05-06-2015 at 12:15 AM.
I understand some of the criticisms lodged against Allen's work, but I don't look at something like Match Point, Cassandra's Dream, or Blue Jasmine and see a boring filmmaker. There are familiar aspects and points of continuity, to be sure, but he's still dependably providing some great wit and drama.
Moreover, like all films, Allen's movies are sites of collaboration: I admire his skills as a storyteller, but even when those aspects aren't as compelling as one would like, there's no paucity of compensatory pleasures. I wrote about this sort of thing in my post on Magic in the Moonlight (by the way, I've since realized that this post originally contained a ridiculously high-res image of Emma Stone's character; I somehow didn't realize that it was such a large file, but I removed it). I'll also defer to David Denby's review of the same movie, where he notes:
Also, as far as "compensatory pleasures" are concerned, Joaquin Phoenix is a sure bet. Khondji served as the DP for Irrational Man, as well. This is partly why I'm looking forward to watching this movie.
Looking back at what I wrote about Magic in the Moonlight, I noticed that I concluded by noting, in perhaps too overstated a manner, the lightness of the proceedings. I was trying to gesture toward the enjoyable experience of that movie: it's striking, breezy, and, in its moment to moment raillery and performative graces, fairly endearing. That sort of thing is OK every now and then; it shouldn't be unduly stigmatized. Actually, as a matinee screening on a pleasant summer's afternoon, it's just the ticket. It's diverting and fairly charming. Its "lightness" is very much a part of Allen's sensibility as a filmmaker and his conception of moviemaking as a temporary respite from the drearier sumps of life:
I get this sort of thing from all manner of movies, but I understand the perspective here. I mean, I don't share Allen's overwhelming cynicism on life and some of his other ideas, but I do appreciate his consideration of the restorative value of cinema and, more specifically, the virtues of a particular kind of moviemaking whose primary ambitions mostly entails generous helpings of repartee and romanticism, alongside a smattering of highfalutin references and allusions. We're talking about one of the fundamental virtues of the medium done well and effectively by one of its notable practitioners: unspooling images as a psychic balm. This isn't what movies should be all the time, of course, but it's part of the tapestry. The exchanges between the very watchable Firth and Stone -- inflected as they are with alternating shades of haughtiness, subterfuge, suspicion, and desire -- do not lead us too far from Groucho Marx's knowing, direct address glances or Humphrey Bogart murmuring "I was misinformed" in Casablanca, or Maurice Chevalier's mugging expressions, etc. These are all "cold drinks on a hot day." Again, that's not what movies are all about, but it would be disingenuous of me to dismiss these kinds of delights as irrelevant to my spectatorship.
We can't elevate all films to the towering significance of, say, Days of Heaven or The Master (incidentally, PTA is one of Allen's favourite filmmakers, and I bet Phoenix's suitability for this latest role occurred to him as a result of watching The Master). In the history of movies, there are gradations of delight and depth, and Allen's films may not always occupy the topmost rung on that ladder, but they're often sumptuously made entertainments and, in other cases, well wrought dramas buoyed by superb and/or magnetic performances.
Last edited by Gittes; 05-08-2015 at 04:51 AM.
I don't mind you getting upset that I don't conform to your ideal of what a film forum commentator should be, but this bit was bugging me.
What you describe here is literally one unprompted comment from me in the Jupiter Ascending thread where I genuinely asked a question, got a reply, and left it at that. And then I believe I replied to another comment in the upcoming thread for the same movie, and the gist was that I hoped he liked it for all the energy he had expended on it.
There is a tonne of stuff you can find where I actually was a bit of a dick, but let's try not to create fan fiction and pretend it's canon.
Last 10 Movies Seen
(90+ = canonical, 80-89 = brilliant, 70-79 = strongly recommended, 60-69 = good, 50-59 = mixed, 40-49 = below average with some good points, 30-39 = poor, 20-29 = bad, 10-19 = terrible, 0-9 = soul-crushingly inept in every way)
Run (2020) 64
The Whistlers (2019) 55
Pawn (2020) 62
Matilda (1996) 37
The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) 61
Moby Dick (2011) 50
Soul (2020) 64
Heroic Duo (2003) 55
A Moment of Romance (1990) 61
As Tears Go By (1988) 65
Stuff at Letterboxd
Listening Habits at LastFM
This is essentially the point where we have to agree to disagree. It's not that I'm just annoyed that Allen's films often revolve around the same themes, the same kind of people, the same points of conflict... This is why every two bit journalist who has to fill up a page with a Woody Allen review refers to those things as his "obsessions". I get that. Hitchcock was the same way.
But Hitchcock grew as an artist and a filmmaker. In 1960, he didn't do Strangers on a Train again - he did Psycho. One of his last movies, Frenzy, was definitively about familiar Hitchcock themes (an innocent man framed, a serial killer, murdered women) but it was a new spin for him in terms of sex, characters, approach to violence, etc. Seen today, it leaves you thinking how his '80s movies would have been like if he hadn't died.
I don't see any difference between what he does in Match Point or Cassandra's Dream (which I kind of enjoyed) and Crimes and Misdemeanors. I see a modern remake of exactly the same movie with nothing new to add. And C&M has better cinematography. I used to be a huge fan of Woody Allen, but the last time I saw one of his movies and didn't feel like I'd seen it before was Sweet and Lowdown.
Incidentally, I just looked at Allen's IMDb page and recalled that Hollywood Ending was renamed La Mirada de los Otros [The Look of Others] in Argentina. That's an interesting title change.
If we're comparing the two, then yes, I also prefer Hitchcock by a pretty considerable margin, and he's clearly the better filmmaker. He's one of the greatest and most notable figures in the history of cinema, and a personal favourite of mine. His body of work strikes me as more varied and interesting.
It's been quite a while since I last watched Match Point, but I do understand that it's redolent of Crimes and Misdemeanors. The latter is superb, and the former, from what I remember, was pretty compelling. I mean, there are critics who noted the similarities but still accepted the fact that Match Point is a well-made and engrossing movie (see Ebert's review). It's familiar, sure, but it's not bad. Also, unless I sit down and revisit both of these, I can't speak with much authority to their overwhelming similarities or differences, but reducing Match Point to a pure recapitulation of Crimes and Misdeameanors (and nothing else) seems like a reductive and unfair assessment.
As for Cassandra's Dream, from what I recall, the exploration of regret is dialled up in ways that are different from Crimes and Misdeameanors, and part of the distinction lies in the fraternal dynamic and certain performative qualities. What I remember most about the film was Colin Farrell's terrific acting and his ability to radiate debilitating guilt in such a credible and memorable way (he called upon similar skills for In Bruges).
As for Blue Jasmine, do you also think that film was only a retread of existing ideas from Allen's filmography? If so, which of his films do you see as antecedents?
Last edited by Gittes; 05-07-2015 at 09:10 PM.
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