What's the matter with Woody? part 2
Got to see Woody's latest, Match Point, in Manhattan. Second row center. Place was packed. Always fun to see the Woodster on his home turf. This one will require two reviews: one for non-Woody fan and one for Woodophiles.
1. Match Point is a great new thriller from Woody Allen. It features great performances from Scarlet Johansen, Brian Cox, and a bunch of British people. It neatly intertwines a young tennis pro's lust for class ascension with his desire for an impossible romance. The plot is tight without being constricting. The paceing is brilliantly executed with intense suspense building gradually to a nail-biting, frenzied climax and finishing with a nice final act which carries the themes to their logical conclusion. The cinematography and operatic soundtrack are typically top-notch and the whole picture works with the mixture of mechanical soundness and detailed craftsmanship that one usually associates with really expensive writstwatches.
2. Heeeeeee's baaaack! After several years wandering in the wilderness of his own laziness, Woody has finally made a real movie again. However, while we should applaud the return of Woody's sense of quality control we must not delude ourselves into think this marks the beginning of a new creative era. He's still canibalizing his own body of work for ideas, but this time he's prepared a well cooked meal. Basically this flick is the Martin Landau half of Crimes and Misdemeanors moved to London and starring younger, better looking people. The usual trad-jazz soundtrack has been replaced by opera but otherwise the song remains the same. ScoJo kicks some serious butt and provides the best female performance in a Woody Allen movie since, well, shit, I'll say it, since Mia Farrow. Having breezed through most of the psuedo-intellectual starlets in Hollywood, hopefully Woody will settle in and make a few more flicks with Miss Scarlett before he kicks it. People have been comparing this to Robart Altman's The Player as far as comeback movies go. I say sure, but let's not forget that Altman made Ready to Wear after he made the Player and it was several years between the Player and Gosford Park. I have a feeling Woody will drop a few clunkers after this gem but I'm encouraged to see that The Curse of the Jade Scorpion was not the beginning of a downward spiral of crappy desperateness that would have tarnished an otherwise incredibly successful career. Match Point doesn't deserve a place in the top-tier but it does vault effortlessly to the front of the line amongst Woody's "unfunny" movies. Beats Interiors and September without even breaking a sweat. If Woody can keep this up he has a chance at being eulogized correctly as a great Amercian master of cinematic form instead of as a guy who used to be funny.
Update:
This is the best review I've seen online.
posted by E at 11:17 PM
5 Comments:
dude, elliot. i watched match point last night, and i thought it was one of the worst movies i've ever paid to see. the dialogue was horribly stilted, there was no momentum, and every character was completely unsympathetic. woody allen missed a great opportunity - audiences are perfectly willing to root for a bad guy to get away with his bad behavior IF the narrative is driven properly (e.g. ocean's eleven), but at no point did i identify with chris wilton even for a moment. all of his female characters are stereotypes: the unstable vapid sexpot, the nagging fertility-obsessed wife, the harping mother-in-law. awful, awful.
then again, i haven't liked a woody allen movie since annie hall. call me crazy, but i don't enjoy watching 45 year old men date high school students.
Homegirl, Stef. Ocean's Eleven had three dimensional non-stereotypical characters? Is Macbeth sympathetic? How can you not root for the guy? Starts out poor and earnest reading the Cambridge companion to Dostoyevsky so he can fake his way through fancy talk conversations with the club members. Goes through the awkward transistion from servant to made man. Go fucking see Anything Else. I fucking dare you. See Curse of the Fucking Jade Scorpion. You will see a filmaker who's lost his goddamn mind. Who's once enormous talent seemed to evaporate into thin air. At least in Match Point he can make a narrative point and follow it through. He can set up a shot and construct a scene and coax a good performance out of an actor. He's still got something. Maybe not "It" but something. If you turned off on Woody after Annie Hall, you've missed a ton of dope ass movies. And since Woody's such a pretensious auteur you can't compare him to a populist sellout like Steven "Schizopolis" Soderbergh. Go see Zelig. Or Shadows and Fog. Go see Hannah and Her Sisters. Shit, waste an afternoon and try to sit through Interiors or September and compare this to his other dramatic work.
I am enthused to hear this review, as I, too, have been mourning the decline since "Scorpion" (which i weathered better than some, being a MASH junkie and loving D.O.S), and then, what, Small Time Crooks? Bah. And, from what I can tell, ScarScar is his new thing now, which I love 'cause I love her (his next film starring her already in the can) A very worthy new "Allen's Girl." Very Farrowesqe, yes, though I'm nuts about almost all of his regulars, even the non-romantic leads, (Diane Weist (sp), Wallace Shawn, and, of course, Alan Alda, my one true love.
As far as nothing good since annie hall, there are definitely at least 9 movies post annie hall worth loving. crimes and misdemeanors, deconstructing harry (quite notably), sweet and lowdown, mighty aphrodite, and all those mentioned by elliot (though i consider zelig and shadows and fog to be brilliant failed experiments, for the truly hard-core fan). yay!!!!!
i wasn't saying that ocean's eleven met all of my other criteria - i was just using it as an example of rooting for bad guys. and i have watched a ton of woody allen movies: anything else, crimes and misdemeanors (sort of interesting), manhattan, husbands and wives, and deconstructing harry (which was, for me, the absolute worst).
and yeah, macbeth was way more sympathetic than this clown chris wilton. macbeth actually had moments of true emotion. this guy is constantly telling everyone what they want to hear and he's just not real at all. even one scene of this guy crying in a bathroom stall or something would have gone a long way with me. yeah, there's a little emotion toward the end but it's too little, too late.
and that slow motion shot when he tosses the ring? come ON. that's horrible.
No it's not. It's the best. Sure it's obvious. The symbolism is trite, but it comes at just the right moment and is used in just the right way and it works. The film works. There is enough emotion at the end. His little breakdown at the coffee table is perfect. Before that there's plenty of desperation, obsession, deception, etc. Totally enough to make a movie work. It's a genre film. It has rules and a form that may mean some plot points are obvious and dumb but that's not the point. The point is London. The point is opera music and nice lighting. The point is it's a well-made film. It's not a steaming pile of cinematic dogshit like most of Woody's post 1994 work.
Post a Comment
<< Home