Moonlighting in the South of France

After nearly fifty years of filmmaking, it's safe to say that we pretty much know Woody Allen's attitude towards all things supernatural.  Religion, God, afterlife, are all concepts that have borne the brunt of Allen's obtuse scorn over the decades.  And yet, as the writer-director pushes 80, it seems he has begun to deconstruct if not incrementally rollback his notoriously rational outlook.

Allen's latest film, Magic in the Moonlight, stars Colin Firth doing what Colin Firth does best: playing Mr. Darcy. Firth plays Stanley Crawford, a magician in 1920s Europe, whose sneering arrogance is eclipsed only by his vicious contempt for all things that can't be unmitigatedly proven by the cold calculations of science.  When word reaches him of a rich American family who has fallen under the spell of a psychic, he quickly travels to the south of France -- where they're summering at their waterfront chateau --  to expose the fraud.

Hoping to inflict as much humiliation as possible, Crawford begins jabbing Sophie Baker (Emma Stone) with sarcastic barbs immediately.  But regardless of his iterations of the impossibility of anything existing outside of empirical proof, Baker's effortless charm and uncanny clairvoyance slowly begins to win over the master skeptic.

This is not one of Allen's classics, but the Côte d'Azur setting and the classical score, including Stravinsky and Beethoven, make for a lovely diversion on a Sunday evening.  Allen became a legend filming in the confines of Manhattan, but his latest European period has proven he is equally adept at filming the radiance and splendour of the Mediterranean. I also appreciated the supporting characters of Caroline (Erica Leerhsen) and George (Jeremy Shamos), who seemed to be taken directly out of Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night.  This and other Lost Generation literary allusions worked much better than the crudely amateurish caricatures of Allen's recent megahit, Midnight in Paris, which in many ways felt like Woody Allen had taken over the Back to the Future franchise.

Crawford/Darcy/Firth's intense rationality sets him up for a comeuppance, even as he continues to spew on about the cold bleakness of life, and death.  Much like his main character, it seems like the great director is softening in his dotage.  Yes, everything Crawford says is true, he's not debating that, but rather he's advocating for a kind of selective amnesia.  Maybe in the face of unimaginable dark nothingness, the key to survival and indeed happiness is to try placing existentialism on the back burner for a while and permit some magic into our lives.  Who knows, if we're lucky perhaps we'll get to experience the greatest magic of all:  love.

A Streetcar Named Retribution

One of Ingmar Bergman's most overlooked and theatrical films is The Devil's Eye.  Released in 1960 and sandwiched between classics like Wild Strawberries and his Trilogy of Faith (Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence), it's easy to see how The Devil's Eye has become lost in modern film circles.  But it's one of Bergman's most inspired works.  The film opens with Don Juan seducing a young maiden only to have his conquest fizzle into nothingness at the moment of consummation.  You see, Don Juan is in hell, and his eternal punishment is to replay this Sisyphean game of seduction, without respite. 

Jasmine, played to neurotic snobby brilliance by Cate Blanchett in a likely Oscar nominated role, shares a similar fate.  The titular character in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, Blanchett is a cold, condescending gold-digger whose sole talent in life is to attract and gracefully seduce obnoxiously wealthy men.  This is in extreme contrast to her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), a simple woman drawn to salt of the earth types.  Their paths intersect when Jasmine's husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), a not-so-thinly veiled version of Bernie Madoff, loses everything and hangs himself in his jail cell, leaving his estranged wife with no choice but to move from Park Avenue to live with her blue collar sister in San Francisco.

Yes, in Woody Allen's world, San Francisco is representative of a rough-talking, pizza-loving, grease-monkey working class because, obviously, his conception of the City by the Bay is stuck on Sam Spade and The Maltese Falcon. 

Jasmine, destitute, is forced, horror of horrors, to work as a dental assistant, and worse, share an apartment with her sister and two kids.  And yet, by the grace of the 1%, wealthy men find her irresistible.  Blanchett's best moment comes when she's dragged to a Marin County fête whose regal vacuousness quickly reminds her of own glorious Hamptons past.  When wealthy widower Dwight Westlake (Peter Sarsgaard) begins cooing to her of a home by the bay, a diplomatic mission in Vienna, and a potential future in politics, Jasmine realizes she unwittingly has got a live one.  The universe is restoring her innate place at the top of the social order.  The light in her face is reilluminated as she instantaneously spurns her unbalanced self-pity for a confident, alluring, and completely fraudulent air.  Jasmine's transmutation alone is worth the price of admission. Dwight falls for her immediately.

Somewhat clumsily (Allen loves churning out these films with such frequency that sometimes details aren't given the attention they deserve), it all falls apart for Jasmine, via Andrew Dice Clay in an understated performance as Ginger's ex-husband Augie who was burned personally and professionally by Jasmine and her criminal husband, and her dreams are once again fizzled into nothingness just at the moment of material consummation.  It's a classic morality tale of the pitfalls of greed, pride, and selfishness.  Maybe in some seventh circle, Don Juan and Jasmine will find each other.  

Review of Inglourious Basterds

Fans of Quentin Tarantino have come to expect one thing from his films:  the unexpected.  The ear-slashing, the Gimp, a raged Robert De Niro, all of Kill Bill, have become staples of the Tarantino ouevre, and of current cinema as we know it, and as future generations will remember it.  

Inglourious Basterds delivers the unexpected in droves.  The film's marketing suggested a Kill Bill-esque 'Jewish-Americans mercilessly slaughtering Nazis' bloodbath, instead, Tarantino gave us a deeply cerebral picture smattered with bursts of relatively mild violence.

With his wordy script and the eye-opening performance of "Jew-Hunter" Christoph Waltz, Tarantino shrewdly captured the true terror of the Nazis.  It wasn't the cattle-car deportation to death camps -- horrible as they were -- but rather the corruptibility of otherwise good people, of the ever-present fear of being found out, whether you were hiding Jews, sympathetic to Jews, a partisan, a spy, or a Jew.  The Jew-Hunter's subtle innuendos, probing questions, suspicious gestures, and discomforting good humour would drive even the stoutest resistance fighter to his breaking point wondering, "How much does he know?" and "How do I escape this man?"


Inglourious Basterds is a fantasy.  In a reality where the majority of the literature, fiction and nonfiction, portrays the Jewish people, helpless and crippled, enduring unimaginable horror from the hyper-aggressive Juggernaut of the Third Reich, Tarantino imagines an alternative where the victims not only have a voice, but a baseball bat as it were, as a vehicle of vengence.


It has become marvelously clear that Tarantino's capacity for innovative storytelling has eclipsed the standard 2-3 hour feature film format (ahem, Kill Bill). Basterds clocked in at 153 minutes, and yet the film felt like it breezed by, with multiple plotlines and asides that begged for proper exposition.  Tarantino has entered the realm of eminent Polish auteur, Krzysztof Kieślowski, who required multiple films (10 to be exact for the appropriately titled Dekalog) to fully express his vision.

With Tarantino you never know what to expect, except this:  he'll keep on keeping on with films that make our palms sweat, our heads shake, and our mouths go, "Oh!"