Cafe Society - Movie Review

Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell, Blake Lively, Corey Stoll, Parker Posey, Ken Stott and Anna Camp.
Written & Directed by Woody Allen.

★★

Oh look, a movie about a nebbish Jew from New York who's contemplating adultery. Must be a Woody Allen film.

I enjoy the Windsor font of the opening credits playing over an old jazz tune. It tells you right away you're back in that world, no matter what time period. This one takes place in the late 1930's, when Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) heads to Hollywood to work for his powerful agent uncle Phil (Steve Carell). While there, he falls for Phil's secretary Vonnie (Kristen Stewart). Vonnie has a secret boyfriend, but she enjoys her time with Bobby.

Eventually Bobby moves back to New York to help run a nightclub with his gangster brother Ben (Corey Stoll). Ben has killed many people to get ahead, and that aspect of him is played for droll effect.

There are some other twists and turns, but the plot moves along in haphazard fashion. The tone keeps shifting abruptly, and Allen seems to be aiming for the sweet spot of Crimes & Misdemeanors where he can go back and forth between comedy and drama. I would say Cafe Society was filmed before the script was really ready. There are themes he brings up which he then drops without really exploring them.

As for the cast, the standout was Kristen Stewart. She has a fresh-faced buoyancy to her performance that shows she's really put the Twilight films in her rear-view. With luck, her career will continue this crawl back to credibility.

Blue Jasmine - DVD Review

Starring Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Louis C.K., Peter Sarsgaard and Michael Stuhlbarg. Directed by Woody Allen.

★★★

Woody Allen may be a pedophile-scumbag, but he's a good writer. It'd be nice to see if he's capable of writing a movie that doesn't have infidelity.

Cate Blanchett is the star of the show here as Jasmine, an upper-crust wife whose life is shattered after her philandering multi-millionaire husband (Alec Baldwin) goes to jail for his Bernie Madoff-level of fraud. The movie goes back and forth between two times, before the fraud was discovered, and how Jasmine's trying to piece her life together now. She goes to move in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), whose own life (and marriage) were ruined when they put all their money into one of her husband's schemes.

Blanchett earned her Golden Globe and SAG wins for this role. It's a great part, but she also makes the most of it. Sometimes good parts float other boats, and all the other actors play well off of her.

Seriously, is there a Woody Allen movie that didn't have infidelity in it?

To Rome with Love - DVD Review

Starring Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penelope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, Alessandra Mastronardi, Alessandro Tiberi, Allison Pill, Ornella Muti and Flavio Parenti. Directed by Woody Allen.

 ★★½

This is middle-of-the-road hit-and-miss Woody Allen.  I mean, I'm still a big fan.  Seeing that white Windsor font against the black screen while a really old song plays is the best kind of introductory cinematic comfort food.

This is an ensemble piece where we have four stories going on that don't bother to link to each other, save for that they all take place in Rome.  We meet a newlywed Italian couple where the uptight husband (Alessandro Tiberi) is the young-Woody stand-in, nervous and insecure.  We meet an architect (Jesse Eisenberg) who runs into an old pro (Alec Baldwin) who may just be an older version of himself.  We meet two nervous parents (Woody Allen, Judy Davis) flying to Italy to meet their daughter's Italian fiance. We also meet Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni), an office drone who is suddenly famous and stalked by paparazzi for no discernible reason.

The success of the movie depends on how successful each storyline works in its own right and how they come together as a whole.  Well, they don't come together as a whole, so how are the parts?

The Benigni thread worked best for me.  It had the whimsical what-if fairy dust of Purple Rose of Cairo or Deconstructing Harry.  I enjoyed Penelope Cruz popping into the newlywed thread as a high-priced call-girl, even if it never lived up to its premise.  The Woody Allen thread had one good gag.  The Eisenberg/Baldwin thread was a waste. I blame some of it on the miscasting of Ellen Page, but the older Baldwin, seeing the trainwreck coming, doesn't really try to stop it.

So it's not a nailgun to the skull like Whatever Works or Curse of the Jade Scorpion, but there are a good twelve Woody movies I'd recommend over this one.

Random Entertainment News - 6/22/11

- While Tarsem's Snow White movie (with Julia Roberts) has cast actual little-people actors like Danny Woodburn as the seven dwarfs, Snow White & the Huntsman sounds like it's going the Lord of the Rings route, as Ian McShane has been cast as the leader of the seven dwarfs in that film. Snow White & the Huntsman also stars Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron and Sam Claflin.

- Woody Allen's next movie, The Bop Decameron, will film in Italy. Allen will appear in this film alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Penelope Cruz, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Judy Davis, Greta Gerwig and Judy Davis. It will open in 2012.

- Jamie Foxx is officially the lead in Quentin Tarantino's spaghetti-southern Django Unchained, about a freed slave who seeks to free his wife from an evil plantation owner, to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson co-star.

- Terry O'Quinn will join his former Lost co-star Daniel Dae Kim on several episodes of CBS's Hawaii Five-0 next season.

Midnight in Paris - Movie Review

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Starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Kathy Bates, Corey Stall, Carla Bruni, Adrien Brody, Tom Hiddleston, Alison Pill, Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy. Directed by Woody Allen.

It's nice to see Woody Allen back in fine form. He had me the first minute where we just get images of Paris, reminiscent of the opening of Manhattan. We see the famous and the alleys and the stairwells and the parks. Then we get Gil (Owen Wilson), a screenwriter vacationing in Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams). She can't wait to get back to Malibu. He's in love with the city and would love to move there. He aspires to quit screenwriting to become a novelist, and hey, all the great American novelists spent some time in Paris.

Since this is an Allen film, we know he's going to be attracted to someone else, and that eventually comes, but in an unexpected way. Let's just say that he winds up meeting some of his idols. The standout for me, and the one that got the biggest laughs was Corey Stoll (Law & Order: LA) as Ernest Hemingway. It was one of those performances where he left me wanting more and I wished his part had been bigger.

Owen Wilson, it turns out, is the perfect stand-in for the typical Woody character. I wouldn't mind seeing them collaborate again.

I'm happy Woody's rediscovered his whimsy, and it's movies like this that demonstrate why so many name actors agree to be in his films. It might turn out to be like this. Other stand-outs include Marion Cottilard as the Frenchwoman who captures Gil's eye, and Michael Sheen as a pedantic friend-in-law Gil would just as soon ditch.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy

Continuing to catch up on old Woody Allen titles.

This 1982 trifle from Woody is okay. It's about three couples spending the evening together and even if it had a benign title, we know that because it's Woody, not all the couples will remain faithful by the time the night is over. I was amused by setting it in the 1900's, where Woody's a Wright-brother-esque inventor, and I enjoyed Jose Ferrer as the pompous professor.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger - DVD Review

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Starring Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Antonio Banderas, Freida Pinto, Lucy Punch, Anna Friel, Pauline Collins, Ewen Bremner and Roger Ashton-Griffiths.
Directed by Woody Allen.

It's not bad, per se, not enterting the level of the painful like Whatever Works. But it is frightfully unnecessary. Woody Allen's been cranking out movie for forty years, but he doesn't seem to have anything new to add to the conversation. I think we all get it. He distrusts marriage, women, happiness, and so we get another stellar cast going through the motions of selfish behavior.

Okay, let's run through this. Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin are Sally and Roy, unhappily married. He wrote a best-selling novel but hasn't been able to sell a second book in several years, draining their resources and her patience with him. Sally is drawn to her boss (Antonio Banderas) while Roy is drawn to their new neighbor (Frieda Pinto). Meanwhile Watts' parents have recently split. Her father Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) is into feeling younger, and therefore hooks up with an "actress" (Lucy Punch) half his age. Her mother Helena (Gemma Jones) is seeking guidance for love and happiness from a psychic who always has the prediction she wants to hear.

Each element of this story has been told before in previous Allen efforts. You can take a subplot here and there from his 1980's work, recast it in England, and voila, he thinks he has a new movie. He relies on a dull narrator to give us background and plot shifts. When I got to the end, I felt like the moral of the story was one I knew at the beginning. We know most of these people are going to end unhappy because they start unhappy. They're craving new love, new validation, but when the reality of other people sinks in, they remain unfulfilled.

The standout here is Jones. Her dithering old-mother character could be one-note but Helena winds up being one of the only sympathetic people moving about Allen's chessboard. Now everyone involved can say they've done a Woody Allen movie. That seems to be the only real point of its existence.