Blue Jasmine

There is a fairly new pattern in the world. Every two years Woody Allen makes a good movie. Between that his movies are either really, really bad or truly acquired taste. After an unholy abomination that was From Rome with Love, truly one of Allen's worst, comes delightful, mature, insightful and surprisingly dark Blue Jasmine.

To Rome with Love

There are certain people working in cinematic world whose decisions puzzle me. One of such decisions is working, working and then working some more when they really don't need to do that - look at composer Alexandre Desplat. For the last few years it has been embarrassing to witness how much he is wasting his talent away. Instead of focusing on quality, he is focusing on quantity. And now look at Woody Allen. He makes one movie a year. And when the movie is as bad as To Rome with Love, I really don't understand the praise he is getting for being so prolific. I for one would much rather have no new movie by Allen this year when the result is that awful.

Midnight in Paris

(94 min, 2011) 
Plot: A romantic comedy about a family traveling to the French capital for business. The party includes a young engaged couple forced to confront the illusion that a life different from their own is better.
Director: Woody Allen
Writer: Woody Allen
Stars: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams and Kathy Bates

From Paris with magic

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

I went to see “Midnight in Paris” because ever since I was fifteen I haven't missed any of Woody Allen's movies. I knew nothing about the film and I really didn't expect for it to have a fantasy element. I thought it's going to be typical Allen's movie with neurotics and amusing situations, witty dialogues and classy cinematography. Well, “Midnight in Paris” has all of that but in the fashion of “The purple rose of Cairo” it also has fantasy in it. It's not the best movie Allen made since “Hannah and her sisters” as many overeager reviewers seem to think, but it's certainly one of his best films.

Gil is about to marry Inez, but before they get married he goes on a trip with her and her parents to Paris. Gil is an aspiring writer and he instantly falls in love with the city. All he wants to do is walk in the rain and soak up the atmosphere. One evening he is walking around the town alone and when the clock hits midnight, much like for fairy tale's Cinderella, a carriage appears and magically takes him back to the 20's – Gil's favorite era. There he meets Scott Fitzgerald and his erratic wife Zelda, Ernest Hemingway and others. He also meets Picasso's muse Adriana and falls in love with her.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

(98 min, 2010)
Director: Woody Allen
Writer: Woody Allen
Stars: Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin
 

You will see a bland, uninteresting movie.

I consider myself lucky. One of my favorite directors, Woody Allen, makes one movie a year. It's almost a luxury, for fans, to have this guarantee that each year, we will get to see something new. Sadly with “You will meet a tall dark stranger” for the first time, since many years that I've been Allen's fan, I feel his creative productivity and the urge to make new movie every 12 months may be a bad thing. Terrible thing, in fact.

The movie follows a pair of married couples, Alfie (Hopkins) and Helena (Jones), and their daughter Sally (Watts) and husband Roy (Brolin), as their passions, ambitions, and anxieties lead them into trouble and out of their minds. After Alfie leaves Helena to pursue his lost youth and a free-spirited call girl named Charmaine (Punch), Helena abandons rationality and surrenders her life to the loopy advice of a charlatan fortune teller. Unhappy in her marriage, Sally develops a crush on her handsome art gallery owner boss, Greg (Banderas), while Roy, a novelist nervously awaiting the response to his latest manuscript, becomes moonstruck over Dia (Pinto), a mystery woman who catches his gaze through a nearby window.

Despite the critics and audience hating “Cassandra's dream” and “Whatever Works” I enjoyed those movies. That's not everything – universally bashed “Anything Else” is my favorite movie by Woody. But there is not much to enjoy in “You will meet a tall dark stranger” and it's his weakest film since “Celebrity”. There are so many things wrong with this film, I don't know where to start. But the biggest flaw is that almost every story arc is not even remotely interesting nor funny or memorable.

Match Point

(124 min, 2005)
Director: Woody Allen
Writer: Woody Allen
Stars: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Emily Mortimer
 

Game of lust.

(spoilers)

“All people seem to be divided into "ordinary" and "extraordinary". The ordinary people must lead a life of strict obedience and have no right to transgress the law because ... they are ordinary. Whereas the extraordinary people have the right to commit any crime they like and transgress the law in any way just because they happen to be extraordinary.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”

Tennis pro Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) takes a job as a tennis instructor and hits it off immediately with one of his students, wealthy young Tom Hewitt (Matthew Goode). Tom introduces Chris to his family and Chris falls quickly into a romance with Tom's sister Chloe. But despite the growing certainty that Chris and Chloe will marry, and the enormous professional and financial advantages that come Chris's way through his relationship with the delighted Hewitt family, Chris becomes increasingly intrigued and eventually romantically involved with Tom's fiance, Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a struggling American actress

Lust. One of the seven deadly sins, the force that drives people towards sex, success, greed. It's like fire, if you play with it without being careful – you will get burnt. The problem with the characters in “Match Point” is that no one is being careful – here are the people driven only by their selfish needs, without caring about others or the consequences of their actions.

Who would thought that Woody Allen will shot a thriller, let alone in London without many jokes in it and without one character that would be the standard one for Allen movies usually played by Woody himself. “Match Point” is viewed as something new in his work, although I've never looked at it like this – after all “Match Point” shares a lot, maybe even too much, with another Allen's movie “Crimes and Misdemeanors”. In fact the whole story, the crucial events in it, are almost exactly the same. There is a lot of irony in “Match Point” but the one surrounding the movie, the fact that most “original” Allen's movie made in years is yet again him recycling old ideas, is probably the funniest part.