Today and Tomorrow

"I'm doomed to want things that aren't things," Ofelia Hunt writes in Today and Tomorrow.

There are plety of things that aren't things in the book. Actually, there isn't anything that is something. There is only ever nothing. Lisbon, New Mexico, Bill Murray are like mantras that are not real that get said to placate reality.

Ofelia Hunt, if she existed, wrote something about metaphor and meaning. She hates them. Metaphors are fake things because they make everything more meaningful than it is. And meaning is meaningless unless it is a lie. And a lie is a metaphor for things that aren't true. And so on.

I felt more strongly about some parts of the novel than others. I wasn't sure about the thin man. And at certain points as it went along it felt more arbitrary than necessary. In her blog, Ofelia often says that she writes and rewrites. And usually that editing process is obvious with precise word choice. But in her novel, she seems to get away from that process. Just a rush of words, a waterfall of sentences. Sometimes.

I felt overwhelmed by it. I wanted to stuff it all inside my brain, but it wouldn't fit. I tried to make a flow chart, but everything flowed into everything else and then into nothing and then into a trash can.

A lot of other reviews like to give a little plot outline about the things that puport to happen in the novel. They are wrong. The trick of the book is to create something out of nothing and vice-versa.

Rendez Vous d'Anna

I've seen a couple of movies by Chantal Akerman. They are all like this. Long and mostly plotless. It's like she likes to push the bounds of cinema, taking it into new directions that are simultaneously banal and beautiful.

Her scenes are more like moving paintings. I kept on thinking of Rothko's subway and Lucien Freud.

She skips over the things other films concern themselves with, focusing on the interim.

There is one scene in which Anna lies in bed listening to the radio for a solid two minutes, which in film feels like forever.

There are a lot of trains and traveling, but also four major conversations.

The first is with a German she picks up and almost has sex with. He tells her about Communism in the 20's and then Nazism in the 30's and all of the aftermath that changed his country.

The second conversation is with her friend Ida who talks to her about the importance of having children.

And then she gets her turn to talk, to her mother about maybe being in love with a woman, or at least kissing her.

The fourth conversation is with her boyfriend or husband, Daniel. "We can't affect what happens. We're just carried along by the current," he says.

I really wished she had never gotten a chance to speak, because I wanted to use this quote from Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan: "I've been accused of [being a good listener] all my life. It's like someone who prays every night saying God's a good listener. Just because you're talking to us doesn't mean we're listening." Because basically all four conversations are actually monologues. They just talk and talk.

There are some interesting moments to watch that feel like they are orchestrated to complement the characterization. Like the automatic doors that open and close. Or when she's walking in the train and she seems to get smaller and smaller going through smaller and smaller doors like Alice in Wonderland. Or how there are so many shots of the backs of people's heads. Silhouettes back-lit by lights the car is driving towards.

(Painting credits: George Tooker - Subway, Mark Rothko - Entrance to Subway, Lucien Freud - Girl in a Blanket, Rene Magritte - Not to Be Reproduced, Edward Hopper - Morning Sun)

Un Amour de Femme

Jeanne (Helene Fillieres) and David (Anthony Delon) are a happy couple with a son until a chance encounter with a dancer at a party introduces the potential for something more.
Although it is clear that Jeanne is immediately struck by the free-spirited Marie (Raffaela Anderson), their mutual seduction of each other takes more time because if Jeanne’s relationship with her family and the stigma of homosexuality.
“I always order what I don’t like,” Jeanne says about her food which is an obviously thin metaphor for her life choices. She must decide what is best for her and her family: To pursue her own happiness and love or to sacrifice herself to a twisted and broken construct.
The film evokes these complex emotions without relying too heavily on direct discourse. It focuses on the way people look at each other, their body language. Dance is just one of the languages of this nonverbal communication.

Le Cercle Rouge

The red circle, according to Buddha and the film's epigram, is where everyone who is destined to meet each other will finally meet. In the film, we are introduced to various men at certain arcs of their trajectory towards that circle.

The day before his release from prison, Corey (Alain Delon) is given a tip by a guard on a job once he's out. Corey goes to Rico, his old partner who has repaid his loyalty by stealing his woman. In return, Corey helps himself to the money in Rico's safe. Which obligates Rico to send some thugs after him. One thing always leads to another.

Meanwhile, Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté), the perpetrator of some unknown crime, escapes from custody and hides in the trunk of Corey's car. Corey provides Vogel's freedom and Vogel returns the favor by killing Rico's thugs. They win each other's trust the only way criminals can, by further implicating themselves in crime. It is a single-direction trip that can only gain momentum.

Inspector Matthei (André Bourvil) is the Spencer Tracy look-alike who was supposed to be guarding Vogel when he escaped. He is the Lt. Philip Gerard to Vogel's Fugitive. He is a good guy, but he has to prove himself to the head of Internal Affairs who asserts, "No one is innocent. All men are guilty."

To round out the team implementing the plan leaked to Corey in jail, Vogel recommends Jansen (Yves Montand), an alcoholic ex-cop with demons and issues of his own to work out.

And last there is Santi (François Périer) who is sort of the bridge between crime and punishment, as it were. He's the bar owner/ mob tie that is Matthei's best link to finding Vogel. Like all of the men, he operates by a code, honor among thieves, and won't rat them out. Unless, of course, he does.

Director Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le Flambeur, Le Samourai) is very good at taking each man at an exact moment somewhere in the middle of their stories and very subtly exposing their entire history.

Coming towards the end of his career, Le Cercle Rouge is supposed to be a culmination of everything Melville has learned from his experiences making crime films. It's his own private red circle, so to speak.

In terms of pacing and mood, it is much more akin to The Asphalt Jungle than The Italian Job. It is not focused on action, but slowly and evocativley building real characters. They may be guilty but they are not amoral. It is each person's sense of duty or honor which propel them to their ineluctable end.

You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger

An older couple going through their 3/4-life crises turn to spiritual and physical respites. She turns to a psychic and he marries a girl half his age. But the spirituality is occultic hocum and the girl ends up sleeping with men her own age.

Meanwhile, one generation down, they are having their own 2/5-life crises. But this time they both dabble in the hopes of love outside of marriage with the addition of literature and art. He struggles to make good on the promise of his first successful novel and she wants to open her own gallery. But neither one succeed.

It's like there are no solutions.

"Sometimes the illusion works better than the medicine," the narrator says at the end of the movie. But in the end, the illusions fail as well. The writer thought that by being with the girl next door and stealing a dead man's novel, he could have it all. But he ends up looking back across the way at his own wife, and the dead man turns out not to be dead. The artist thinks that all she has to do is express her desire for her boss and borrow money from her mother, but her boss doesn't reciprocate her feelings and her mother doesn't loan her the money.

It was all an illusion: eternal youth, spirits or stars guiding the future, the notion of romantic love, the ability to express oneself through art. And how much good did any of it do them?

It's kind of a cynical message, given the bulk of Woody Allen's work.

Whatever Works

"You gotta take what little pleasure you can find in this chamber of horrors," Larry David says for Woody Allen at the beginning of the movie.

The solution to the silence of god and the terror of death is love, or sex, whichever you can manage.

The problem with this movie is the jokes. They're just not funny. They are either throw-away quips that are only funny on paper, like when Larry gets a panic attack and Evan Rachel Wood turns on the television to calm him.
"I saw the abyss," Larry says.
"Don't worry, we'll watch something else."
Whereas the other jokes get hit repeatedly on the head with a dead fish.

This isn't my favorite movie of Woody Allen's. Usually when he returns to older material it is during a period of stagnation. But he'd just been putting out some really mature and worthwhile movies. So it's suprising this vehicle originally written for Zero Mostel flopped so badly.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Vicky has normal values, Cristina pursues the alternative lifestyle and Barcelona is the place that offers the opportunity to remain exactly the same.

"[Cristina's] contempt for normal values is boring and cliche," Vicky's husband says. But it is he who is boring, talking trivially over the beautiful Spanish guitar.

It's ironic that Woody Allen uses a narrator who just sounds like he is saying: "Blah blah blah." I mean, why was it necessary for him to narrate that they walked around taking photographs, when it is clearly depicted by the scene? The use of narration was over-bearing and might have been the things keeping me from truly enjoying the film.

It's ambivalent what the moral is supposed to be. I'm tempted to say "whatever works" because it's a line from not just this movie but a couple of Woody Allen's others. But what is working in this movie? Does it mean whatever is working in this particular moment? Ignoring the inevitable ruin that is being driven towards? Because none of the relationships that arose were really working or could have worked for a prolonged period. And so everyone just goes back to status quo. Maybe that is what works. Some people live according to social structures, some pursue romantic passion and others are chronically dissatisfied no matter what they try.

"We are alive," Javier Bardem says, which seems to be the only common bond. Life is too short to worry about how other people choose to pursue happiness. It is too fraught with pain and the fear of death. This moment is the one in which we live. And yet most of us are too scared to be alive in that moment.

Cassandra's Dream

There is a different feeling to Cassandra's Dream that I couldn't quite identify at first. Something new for Woody Allen. I thought it was the English locale, but this was his third movie there. I finally figured out what it was: the score. I'm pretty sure this was his first film with new music scored for it, and by Philip Glass no less.

"I think it's a very moral play [or film]... about evil, about fate. I do think that the writing is very pessimistic. And all that stuff about life being a tragic experience."
"I think we make our own fate," Ewan McGregor says. "I believe that."

Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell are two sides of the same coin. They're both in need of help. But where Ewan wants to springboard a new career and love life, Colin needs to dig himself out of bad gambling debts. The themes of chance, luck and fate are all tightly interwoven so that the seemingly only window for freedom is the very means of entrapment.

Their uncle is the family benefactor who is always at hand to improve the lives of his family. And now, when they need him more than ever, he needs them as well to get himself out of some very serious trouble. It's a kind of Hitchcockian quid pro quo scenario.

But because Colin is the dark side of the force, his brooding undoes him. He is racked with guilt until he forces a confrontation, pitting the sides of the coin against each other.

This seems a companion piece to Match Point. It is tonally and thematically similar with the lighter, creamier Scoop sandwiched in the middle.

Scoop

Joe Strombel is a journalist who's just gotten the scoop of a lifetime. The only problem is, he's dead.

On the other side of the grave he gets a tip that Peter Lyman, famous and politically-aspiring son of Lord Lyman, may very well be the as-yet-uncaught Tarot card killer.

This movie may be full of improbabilities, but I still like it. I'm not just talking about the beyond the grave stuff. First: why is Scarlett Johansson hanging out with a magician? Second: besides that it's Scarlett Johannsson, it is a little unlikely that Peter would just happen to fall in love with her.

This isn't one of Woody Allen's serious movies, nor does it plumb his personal relationships or neuroses. It's just a good old fashioned murder mystery.

Match Point

Woody Allen returns to the theme of Crimes and Misdemeanors: a man kills his mistress because he can't leave a wife he doesn't love. "Despair is the path of least resistance."

Every flaw I saw in Crimes and Misdemeanors was tightened for Match Point. It was more subtle if maybe a little too drawn out.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers never made it successfully as a tennis pro because, as one of his opponents pointed out, the ball fell too often on his side of the net. Luck, Jonathan would call it, or the lack of it. But it is this very failure of his that makes the difference in the end. What is unlucky in one situation might be lucky in another. Coming right after Melinda and Melinda, Match Point seems a much better contemplation on how one moment could be considered either tragic or, if not comic, at least lucky.

This is Woody's first serious movie in thirteen years and I think he really made the most of it.

Melinda and Melinda

The first thing someone (me) might notice about Melinda and Melinda is the person of color on the DVD cover. It brings up a complex issue of race and Woody Allen's vision of New York (and the world). I don't particularly feel up to the task of pursuing it, but I did find this dialogue between two random and anonymous strangers that I will let stand in place of any comment I might make. I do think the issue is an interesting one, and my contribution to the conversation, if I were technologically savvy, would be to embed a clip from Everyone Says I Love You right here: [x]. Obviously, I am not technologically savvy, so I will have to describe the scene. First of all, Everyone Says I Love You is full of diverse ethnicities. But my favorite example is from the very end where the narrator says she has recently been seeing a rapper and there's a shot of him with actual rapping which is so unconventional for a Woody Allen movie.

Now that that's over with, we can look at the actual movie which has nothing to do with race. The premise is that the same story can be told as a tragedy or a comedy, depending on your outlook. The ramification being that it is a microcosm of life. But first of all, it isn't the same story, and secondly, I didn't find the tragedy to be tragic nor the comedy funny.

I don't know if this movie would have been better if it had obeyed its own premise more precisely. It would have become redundant with slight differentiations enhancing each element. Or it could have been Rashomon. Because the idea is that you can read the same story as either tragic or comic. Not that you can retell the skeleton of a story two completely different ways with different results. But that was what Melinda and Melinda did.

Tragedy, in the words of Richard Dreyfus from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is when "the bad end unhappily, the good unluckily." I'm not going to say that the Melinda of the tragic story deserved what she got, but she did drive herself there. I failed to find it compelling or convincing as a tragic story. "I'm one of those heroines too high-strung for existence on this planet," Melinda admits. "Although I brought my worst troubles on myself." And the only thing funny about the comedy part was Will Ferrell who probably would have been even funnier if he hadn't just been doing Woody Allen.

You'd think that this would be the ultimate expression of Woody Allen's oeuvre considering he is always pitting his humor against pathos. There are his funny movies and there are his serious movies. But never before has he so extremely attempted to divest them of each other diametrically. Which is what, unfortunately, keeps it from congealing into a whole.

Anything Else

Jason Biggs plays a character who is a bear rug in a grizzly bear world. He just lies down and lets everyone walk all over him, and they take every opportunity to do so.

My theory is that Woody Allen has traveled from the future to alter his own history. That was why they were wearing the same outfit when they met. Woody wants to impart some post-9/11 constructive paranoia in himself so that he will get out of New York before the planes hit the fan.

"It's very important you learn to depend only on yourself," Woody says about masturbation. But he intends for Jason to apply it to his life.

There are some pretty funny quips peppered through the beginning of the movie, but they kind of die out at about the same time as my interest. I think when I first saw this movie I thought it was "not bad." And that's about all I can say for it now, unless my theory about time travel is true. I suppose it is as true as anything else.

Hollywood Ending

It's been ten years since Woody Allen's character has made a good movie. He's derisively referred to as an "auteur genius." But when his ex-wife gives him a chance to make a comeback movie, he's stricken with psychosomatic blindness.

It's interesting to note that ten years is how long Woody has been with Soon-Yi, his step-daughter whom he later married. Also the blindness of the movie was caused by his estranged relationship with his son. Which must mirror Woody's feelings about his own estranged son.

I've often suggested an autobiographical approach to reading Woody Allen's films. And I've been waiting to see how he would depict his relationship with his step-daughter. It's sort of a very delicate issue because on one hand, I know that a lot of people like to dismiss him as a pedophile and refuse to watch his movies on that basis. But I take a more practical view point in which I don't let any error of judgment in his personal life affect my viewing of his movies. Because in the end, I believe that Woody really wants to rewrite his life. To put a kind of Hollywood ending on the messy aspects of life that maybe he regrets. Although I don't really think he regrets being with Soon-Yi. But it is interesting that, given the chance to depict his Hollywood ending, he chooses to return to his ex-wife (whoever that may represent in Woody's actual life).

I don't think my interpretation is far-fetched. "In order to make movies, you have to think about the audience. You have to. Otherwise, you're just making movies for yourself, like artistic masturbation... You're a narcissist," one character says to Woody Allen. To which he replies: "I'm a classic narcissist then." Woody's movies aren't primarily made for us, for me to blog about them. They are made for himself, "to produce a kind of working through-situation so that [he] can get in touch with feelings [he] didn't know [he] had," as he said in Manhattan.

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

Small Time Crooks only gave the promise of a caper which may have whetted Woody's appetite to make a full-fledged noir/comedy.

You get the feeling that he is playing, having fun with the genre. His back-and-forth bantering is not meant to be taken seriously and is hilarious.

The basic premise is that Woody Allen is an insurance investigator who has run afoul of the new efficiency supervisor, Helen Hunt. She wants to streamline and update things and he lives by his his instincts and street code. But when they're both hypnotized, a pandora's box is opened where jewel thievery seems uncannily unsovlable and laten longing is brought to the fore.

I'm not even tempted really to dig around and see if there is anything to assist my thesis about Woody's autobiographical method of film-making. Ok, so I'm a little tempted. But this is such a fun film. It may not be a great film, but it is light hearted and happy ending, and that is enough for me.

Small Time Crooks

This is the first movie in a long time where Woody doesn't play an urban intellectual. You know, there's always a novelist, editor, director, something. I try not to read too much into his movies, but it makes me think he's gone back to his Take the Money and Run period.

The movie starts out with this Ladykillers-esque idea to buy an empty pizza joint and tunnel into a nearby bank. Woody's wife, Frenchy (Tracey Ullman), would be the front, selling cookies. But the front is an actual success where the robbery is not. They become rich but not happy. Frenchy wants to be civilized and cultured, but Woody misses having cheeseburgers. In the end, everything returns to status quo.

Woody Allen likes the finer things like Brecht and Bergman, but he also likes baseball and bimboes.
 
I also thought that it was interesting that his character preferred to make an honest living by stealing than to live a fake life off honestly-earned income.

Sweet and Lowdown

Emmet Ray was the second-best jazz guitarist in the world, according to this faux bio-pic.

"You keep your feelings all locked up and you can't feel nothing for anybody else," Emmet's girl tells him.
"You say that like it's a bad thing. Some terrible things happen to people in love. I know, I've seen it. I enjoy the company of women. I love 'em. It's just that I don't need 'em. I guess, you know, that's the way it is when you're a true artist... I let my feelings come out through my music."
"Maybe if you let your feelings out in real life, then your music would be even better."

This sounds like echoes of Woody Allen. But it is also genuine to the character.
Emmet is the lowdown part of the movie. He is crass and emotionally withdrawn. Until he meets sweet Hattie. Hattie possesses the one quality I prefer in women: speechlessness. Just kidding. Samantha Morton is terrific as the mute girl who is the only woman Emmet ever loves, if he would only admit it to himself.

This movie is one of Woody Allen's saddest for me.

Celebrity

Every decade, Woody Allen is in fewer of his own movies, but there is always a surrogate. This time it is Kenneth Brannagh and he is a struggling writer. He goes from travel writing to screenplays and then a novel. He also can't stick to any woman. There doesn't seem to be any real substance in this Altmanesque film. This is supposed to be Woody's take on "a society in which everyone is famous," to borrow a line from the movie. And it is full of celebrities. But they don't do anything. Maybe that's the critique. That celebrity is a facade and the notion of notriety is shallow at best. Even if that were true, I don't know if it makes the movie exactly a scathing commentary. I think that the later Small Time Crooks, although not directly about celebrities, is a much more astute indictment of success in the supposed American dream.

Deconstructing Harry

1. Deconstruction in literature is the process of examining contradictions in a text to prove that there is no one truth. There are multiple interpretations of meaning. At the end of the movie, someone says that although Harry's stories are sad, she enjoys deconstructing them to find the happiness that lies underneath.

2. Deconstructivism is a movement (especially in architecture) that focuses on fragmentation as a source of stylistic innovation. The outward manifestation of inner struggle.

3. Woody Allen plays a writer writing about writers who lately has a writing block although he is being honored for his work. The not being able to write about writing about writing telescopes the film so that we look at it very closely, so close as to obscure the metaphor.

4. Through his stories and flashbacks, Harry's relationship with women is seen as a series of failures and now he can't get anyone to go with him to the honoring ceremony except a prostitute.

5. "I can't love," Woody Allen says. He goes from one doomed relationship to another because he knows that if he ever stays with any one person he will be unveiled for the miserable person he is.

6. "You put your art in your work. I put it in my life," Billy Crystal's character tells Woody Allen. He returns to the idea that although he might not know how to live, he can reinterpret things in art and try to redeem himself.

7. "This is not a book. We are not characters in a fictional... thing," Woody Allen tells Elisabeth Shue. Which is simultaneously true and not true. The internal contradiction of the statement proves the deconstruction that Woody Allen is performing in this movie. He is simultaneously hiding himself through fiction and revealing himself. "It's me thinly disguised. In fact, I don't even think I should disguise it anymore. It's me."

Everyone Says I Love You

I'm trying to disentangle my loathing of the musical form from my criticism of Woody Allen. It's almost impossible. I mean, I get the whole suspension of disbelief thing which seems natural to a Woody Allen film. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. But even if I were to disregard the music entirely (which you really can't do; it's not a topical ointment), I still don't think I would have really liked this movie.

There aren't any strong characters. Everyone seemes to be filmed obliquely. I don't think I once saw the narrator's face straight on. Edward Norton is miscast as a sort of Woody Allen impersonator. Natalie Portman just stands in the background eating sandwiches.

There's a lot of puddle jumping from New York to Paris to Italy for no real reason except to provide exotic backgrounds.

It's not very romantic. Granted, there's always a boy-loses-girl moment in the RomCom formula. But when Drew Barrymore leaves Edward Norton for an excon, even if it was compulsive and ill-planned, she gives a pretty good reason for not being with Norton: he's a gerbil. So that when boy gets girl back, it seems disingenuous. And then there is Woody Allen's seduction of Julia Roberts. He uses information she confided to her psychiatrist to fake his way into her fantasies. And it works. But he doesn't really love her and she doesn't love him, so of course it doesn't last. No relationship really ends up perfectly like in your typical RomCom. I guess for that I can be grateful. But it's just odd that the romantic climax of the movie is Woody kissing his ex-wife who is remarried. Despite all the earmarks of the musical romantic comedy, it never fully is one.

There were a few moments where the format of the musical actually enhanced the humor, like when the homeless bum started singing or the guy in the wheelchair was dancing. So I think I liked the ideas of the movie's premise (which I'm not thoroughly convinced were intentional). Subverting the musical romantic comedy with an imperfect ending and unexpected, maybe even self-contradictory elements. But actually having to watch it made my nose bleed.

Pain

I like Ofelia's description of this cover.