The first gap (87-94) made the most sense - I barely saw any movies in the late 80s - 88-91, say, I'd be surprised if I saw a dozen new films combined. That changed, and after I started going to films again, I finally got around to seeing Woody Allen again... But here - the truth is, I didn't love Radio Days - found it sentimental nostalgia, not up to proper Woody Allen - Sleeper or Annie Hall or Zelig or even Broadway Danny Rose (which I greatly enjoyed on its release.) And Bullets Over Broadway, which came well hyped, proved to be amusing, but kind of drab - predictable plot and characters, a bit forced and over designed. So though I enjoyed it, I didn't feel obliged to see the next Allen film... though throughout the late 90s I always considered it - I'd plan to see them - but it never worked out... What finally did work out was The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Why? Because I was stuck in Manchester New Hampshire for a week, with 3 channels of cable and dial up connection to AOL to fill the evenings - a movie was a joyous respite. The Woody Allen was the best of what must have been a dreary slate up in the hinterlands - o that's where we went. And again - I enjoyed it - it was fun, like a Duck Tale on film - maybe not a Carl Barks duck tale, but a decent imitation... But that's not enough to send you back to the auteur, and the next few Woody Allen films are so forgettable I would not know they existed if I had not looked them up. And then he moved to England for a few films, which - in the immortal words of Belle Waring, "has been implausibly touted as watchable"...
Right. Now comes a new Woody Allen, this one set in Barcelona, and again, inspiring a certain amount of gushing in the press - not very plausibly, to be sure, but still. And again I found myself with a weekend without any inspiring options and excellent weather that convinced me to hike over to Coolidge Corner to see the it.
Michael Atkinson is right. This is not something that happens to me much - but there I was, 15, 20 minutes into the film, the scene in the restaurant, where Javier Bardem has invited the girls off for a weekend of sight-seeing and sex, then left them to argue about it - one of them is an uptight wise ass nerd, the other a dreamy insecure hedonistic, so they disagree - and keep disagreeing, and Woody keeps cutting back and forth between them, simple 3/4 shots, cutting, back and forth, as they drone on and on and on and... I don't think I've ever actually bailed on a film - but if this had happened five minutes earlier - if I had had time to go downstairs and see Frozen River instead - I would have. It was close. Instead I scanned the back of the shot, hoping something would move back there to give me something else to look at... there was a nice shot somewhere, early in the film, some combination of characters blabbing away in the middle of the screen, but in the corner, Allen had left a statue, sort of out of focus, but visible. Probably an accident - maybe the matte as wrong... But for a bit, there was something to look at!
I was able to take some comfort over the next hour or so in spotting the better films Allen was intentionally or otherwise referencing. Given the dry voiceover, the setting, the characters - not just the uptight nerd/hedonist central pairing, but all the insufferable rich Americans around them - even the frigging plot, with the two Americans getting tangled up with the same local lovers, with a dangerous ex- turning up with a gun to resolve the whole thing - it is hard not to drop the "Vicky Cristina" part of the title and think of the almost unimaginably better Barcelona. Now that's a movie. And while Stillman is not exactly Wes Anderson with a camera (...and the voiceover, the Americans trying to "find themselves" in an exotic land, etc., occasionally called him to mind too...), he knows how to cover a scene to bring out the best in the dialogue. Though of course, he also writes dialogue that is funny and clever and tells a story and all the other good things Woody Allen used to do somewhere in the dim past. He also makes characters - even those representing types, even a lot of the bit players - interesting, worth finding out more about. He seems interested in finding out more about them. Not so Mr. Allen, not in 2008. No one ever is or does or says anything that was not more or less obviously predictable from the minute they appear onscreen - unless they are required to behave in a certain way for Plot Purposes.
I wish - in a dream, Woody Allen has a tiff with some financier on the set and goes home in a huff and the Insurance Stooges step in and demand someone Finish the Film - Whit Stillman would be a fine choice; Wes Anderson too; or Pedro Almodovar, another one Allen seems to be trying to channel here. Or nearly anyone, really.... They've got a gorgeous cast, they've got Barcelona, they have the bare makings of a decent story - it can't be that hard to make something watchable. Instead - this looks and plays like a soft-core porn film with the sex scenes cut out. Dull, unbelievable, and promising titillation but then primly turning away whenever something smutty starts to appear. And just so boring to look at! all those streets, those houses, those Gaudi buildings, and there's never anything going on anywhere but between whichever two characters are droning away in the foreground. (Or middle distance - where they wander listlessly back and forth...) None of the background business, the elaborate compositions, etc. that Anderson loves; lacking the patience and interest in group dynamics Stillman has; none of the joy in design, in colors and movement, even in just the solid facts of human bodies, that Almodovar has. Dull editing - that's what almost sent me running, the plain back and forth cuts, edited to a metronome I think... nothing.
I'll leave with one more complaint. A documentary turned up on PBS this weekend - "Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey" - showing a biologist, Spencer Wells, traveling round the world, tracing the genetic history of man... okay - nothing special - but full of shots that - why can't Woody Allen do this?
Look at that shot - the kid in the background - the statue... but especially the kid - who, in the actual shot, follows Wells and the camera as Wells walks around that wall, or whatever it is. It's a great shot - funny in itself - almost impossible to imagine the filmmakers set it up, the kid I mean... It's the main thing missing in the Allen film. Any sense of there being anything alive in the shot - anything in the shot not there on purpose, or - anything in the shot that isn't completely functional in the shot. (It's probably the same thing: Wes Anderson's films are full of that kind of background business, though all of it is exquisitely choreographed. So it's not spontaneity that's missing, it's - anything.) There's nothing. Allen isn't a good enough writer, not now, to pull off turning on the camera and letting the words come - and really, no one any good actually does that anyway. But he has no ideas - no ides how to turn a simple dialogue scene into an interesting dialogue scene. Nothing that opens the film up - or, really, closes the film in. (If he were making a film about claustrophobia - he doesn't do that either.) It's just there.
4 comments:
Oh, wow - you actually think that pretentious jerkoff Wes Anderson is better than Woody Allen?
Words fail me.
Good lord, yes. They don't call em moving pictures for nothing. I also helps to be able to write a script where half the scenes don't play as if you had to cram something in at the last minute to make the story come out right.
I generally prefer Anderson's humanism to Allen's nihilism, though that's not a question of talent, but I think Allen's complete lack of ambiguity vis a vis said philosophy has become wearying.
And of course, to make a film with Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johanssen in which Javier Bardem entices them into a threesome, and to spend most of the time looking at scenery, is to go beyond "tasteful implication" and into the realm of wasted potential.
It is odd - VCB is a very interesting failure. In terms of what, exactly, annoyed me so about it. Part of it is the mediocrity of the story - the transparent plot devices that pop up to get things moving when they seem about to drift off into nothingness... Part of it, though, is the style - Allen doesn't do anything with the camera - or staging, editing, pacing... that's what lost me, the dullness of the original invitation scene, those plain cuts back and forth on the lines - how could he have done it? what did it need to work? It's not easy to answer. I may have to come back to it. Seeing Chabrol and Rohmer might have some bearing. A Girl Cut in Two, particularly, has certain parallels - it's worth trying to parse out what's different. In the filmmaking, more than the type of story or the themes... though I suppose that's part of it...
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