Sky K Studios Movie Blog

Melinda and Melinda

I'm a huge sucker for Woody Allen. The man, to me, is one of the best chroniclers of humanity in all of our inanity. Another way of saying all this, to be sure, is that for at least a decade he's been a near-constant disappointment. The Woody of the 90s seemed to stop dealing with the issues that showed him to be the genius he can sometimes be, or when he did try to tackle them, he did it poorly and/or offensively. So I've seen a gradual lowering of my own expectations every subsequent time I go see one of his films.

What a treat, then, to leave a Woody Allen film for the first time in as long as I can remember, and not simply shrug it off as another miss.

First, let's do some categorization. By and large, Woody is a comedian, but there's comedy and then there's comedy. In what we'll call his Group A movies (this is an attempt to group, not to heirarchize, though I probably wouldn't dispute a rough lining up of the two), are the works such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters. Comedy, yes, but serious comedy: here, Woody struggles with serious existential and interpersonal issues. (I'd argue this is also Woody at his best, but for the moment let's keep to theme.) Since Hannah (1986), he's picked up this thread a few times, not with any great results. I liked 1992's Husbands & Wives more than most did, but the warmth and good nature evident in his earlier Class A works was gone. The shrillness and vitriol of H&W then hit its apex in 1997's Deconstructing Harry: Woody at his most hateful and, yes, mysoginistic. Other than these two entries, I don't think anything since Hannah has really picked up these Class A threads.

So what the hell else has the Stephen King of film been making in all his prolificness? Silly comedies, or what I'll call his Class B films. This is a lot of what he's known for, and often for good reason. Here's where he started his career, and it's been his touchstone: the best of the Class B include Love & Death, Zelig, Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway. Just about everything he's done in the past decade has fallen into this group. This isn't surprising, but these have struck me as mere placeholder films-- he's doing something, you know what you're going to get with them, but they're pretty forgettable. Curse of the Jade Scorpion? Small Time Crooks? Celebrity? Everyone Says I Love You? Are these standout films for anyone? About the only reason to see them is to see how Kenneth Branaugh or Ed Norton will play the obligatory Woody stand-in role.

Of course, there's no bright line separating Class A from Class B-- the silly comedies have plenty of seriousness in them, and the more serious works have plenty of silliness in them. So maybe I am categorizing based on quality after all-- maybe Class A is just the group of films that work (even if they are offensive). But the Class B films have a feeling of formula to them: a situation is set up and the players are put in motion. The Class A films feel more driven by characters than by plot.

(Let's leave alone for now the Class C films -- his "dark trio" of Bergman-inspired films: Interiors, September and Another Woman. And let's also acknowledge that a (very) few films do not fall neatly into this categorization, including some good works like Crimes & Misdemeanors and Shawdows & Fog.)

So we've always assumed that Woody would return at some point to a real Class A work, and that he would do it in a way that wasn't filled with bile. I'm pleased to say that with Melinda and Melinda, he's finally done that. Does it rank up there with Annie Hall or Hannah? Hells no. But he has definitely picked up on the same themes, and done it with the same humanity.

The conceit (as if you don't know) is that a comedist and a tragedist (both playwrights) are arguing over whether life is essentially comic or tragic. They each take the same set of basic facts (suicide attempts, faltering marriages, deception, lust, frustrated artists, and of course a black piano player who amazingly manages not to be named Sam) and each spins out his own version of the story. Two sets of characters, two parallel tales-- one comic, one tragic.

(Parenthetical shout out to Will Ferrell, who does two very impressive things here: first, he does comedy with pathos and in a way that is not cartoonish-- in contrast to most of the shit he does. Second, he plays the obligatory Woody stand-in role better than anyone in a really long time: he conveys the anxiety, and the mix of self-importance and self-loathing without falling back on a cliche Woody Allen imitation.)

Probably what keeps this film from being among his best works is its modesty of goals. Instead of positing answers, Woody seems to be exploring the ambiguity. Of course life isn't comic or tragic-- we have both. So in setting up the conceit through a frame story, Woody tells us exactly what he's about to do, and then he does it. It's great to see the stories play out, but once the frame is given, we know exactly what he's going to be doing for the next hundred minutes. And he does it well. But there's no real moment of redemption. No "you've got to have a little faith in people." No epiphany while watching Duck Soup (though that moment does have its revival house analogue here).

The lack of such a moment is only half a problem, though. Because those revalatory moments (throw in the end of Annie Hall, also) are revalatory in that they finally embrace the ambiguity and uncertainty. It's Woody shrugging off any real answers: "Knowability? Verifiability? Real truths?" you can hear the one-time philosophy student saying, "Forget it-- let's try just hanging onto decency and humanity, because we'll have our hands full with that alone." So the seeds of Melinda and Melinda's ambiguity are there, have been there for decades. Which brings us back to the modesty-of-enterprise issue.

But screw it. No one, not even Woody Allen, can be Woody Allen every time out. Let's just be thankful that this time, he was. He wasn't his best self, not by a long shot, but after a long, dry and painful decade, he is back.

posted by Jon Z at 10:32 AM | 2 comment(s)

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

The Ballad of Jack and Rose tells the story of a dying man and his daughter. They live on an island, among the ruins of an intentional community that has faded away since its height in the sixties. The island and the title characters bring to mind Dr. Rappaccini and Beatrice of Hawthorne's short story Rappaccini's Daughter. In that story, a scientist raises his daughter amid poisonous plants as an experiment to make her immune to the worst of the world; Jack has kept Rose out of school since she was eleven, preserving in her the last vestige of the commune's dream of a better world.

The intensity of their relationship drives the movie but also strains belief, and the movie comes off as something of a frostbite victim, pulling warmth away from the extremities and into the core. Jack and Rose on their own are pitiable curiosities, and the time the movie spends with just the two of them is suffocating. But the scenes where Jack and Rose have to live among people crackle unpredictably.

The movie's great accomplishment is that as much as Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis) would like to suck all the oxygen from the room, he can't: the other actors are too damn good. Catherine Keener plays a co-dependent, blue-collar single mom who with moves out to the island to take care of Jack in his decline. She comes with too little preparation and two sons, each the fruit of a different (but equally ill-advised) affair. In stark contrast to Jack and Rose's willed fantasy of separation, every move she makes is desperately social. She needs people, and she knows they won't stay around her without a lot of deliberate, planned labor. By themselves, Jack and Rose are just about too far gone, veering towards incest and airlessness; the movie is at its best when Keener's human character has to adapt to their funhouse commune. Keener's two sons, a proto-sexy acne-touched burnout and a schlubby gay hairdresser, neither played by a recognized actor, each hold their own and more. Even the "evil developer" whose encroachments threaten all that is good is written and played humanely; it helps that he's Beau Bridges, who can play this part as a stolid citizen who likes building places for people to live (albeit over wetlands), not as a villain who cackles and counts his gold bags.

The sympathetic portrayal of the developer is to Jack and Rose's political credit; but its portrayal of the sixties is even more politically complicated. My first though was that it was outright reactionary. Jack's communal vision could only be underwritten by his personal fortune; the only end to that vision is in a hospice cloister, with incest and poisonous serpents looming. (Rappaccini's Garden was an inversion of Eden, and it's just as likely that Miller was playing with that myth and ending up in the same place as it was that she cribbed from Hawthorne.) But, of course, it's not the only end; daughter Rose escapes the island, and you could argue that in her quasi-communal, agrarian life After The Fall, the vision of the sixties continues to play out. But though life she builds is generous and organic, it is not political.

For politics, it seems, are too toxic. At the end of Rappaccini's Daughter, the dying title character Beatrice asks her father, who has made her immune to poison but fatally susceptible to its antidote, "Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?" Rose can purge the poison from her system. But it is quite clearly poison.

posted by Josh K-sky at 5:18 PM | 0 comment(s)

Sin City

I was so ready to not like this movie. I'd skeptically heard peoples' positive reactions and I'd also read the review in the Times, and the depiction in the Times just struck me as what I'd expected it to be, so my judgment was vindicated even before it was passed. I was wrong.

Sin City turned out to be a greasy, gritty, high-tech noir that took seriously its task of not taking itself seriously. Which is to say that Rodriguez (& co.) succeeded in his goal of not adapting the comic (yeah, I called it that) for the big screen, but in translating it. His success may not mean that Sin City is the best film to be made from a comic (Spider Man 2 looms pretty large), but it may be the best comic-on-the-big-screen. The stylized dialogue, the camera shots, the unnatural colors jumping out of the dark shadows, the cuts to profile, the superhero attitudes and achievements: this is a comic book. The only other film (and here I'm inviting you to show me that my pot-addled short-term memory serves me wrong) I can think of that tries to be a comic book was The Hulk. The Hulk cut back and forth between live action and animated panels, and it relied on cliche devices like pages riffling. No such articifce in Sin City. Or rather, Sin City takes all the artifice of the comic, and breaks down the dividing line between comic and movie in exactly the way that The Hulk failed to.

Other than that Times piece, I don't know what critics have said about the movie, but I'd imagine it would mainly be about the lame dialogue and the gore. But that's comics-- that's where the director(s) succeeded. They took the form of the comic more seriously than they took the form of the blockbuster, and that seriousness means including all of the goofiness you find in comics. Which is why plenty of scenes leave you unsure whether to groan and roll your eyes or to wince and flinch.

The story (or stories, depending on how hard you want to look to find the connections between the three acts (think, unsurprisingly, of Pulp Fiction)) is engaging, the action is kick-ass and the visuals could at times be stunning (all the nearly-nude eye candy didn't hurt), but the real reason to see Sin City is that it's a reminder that there are still new things to be done with movies.

posted by Jon Z at 4:34 PM | 1 comment(s)