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• On Woody Allen in Rome

  April 4, 2012 @ 10:24 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Ah, Woody Allen. Everybody has an opinion about the great man. Three or four malcontents still argue that he was only ever any good when he was making “the early funny ones“. These maniacs date his decline to the release of Annie Hall. That is to say they believe that the last time Allen was worth watching was when Jimmy Carter was president and Smokie were still in the charts. More sober analysts reckon he began slipping at some point in the 1990s. Bullets Over Broadway was good, but, after that, unfunny hell took over. A few nutters claim that he was never amusing at all.

  I remain a fairly unshakable enthusiast. Yes, there have, in recent years, been atrocities such as Cassandra’s Dream and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. But there have been funny oddities such as Whatever Works, overlooked gems such as Anything Else and half-decent films such as Small Time Crooks. If this year’s Woody doesn’t suit you then hang around for another 12 months. He continues to churn them out with same regularity that Cadbury’s bring to their Creme Eggs.

  Midnight in Paris was an odd one. I was lucky enough to see the film at its premiere in Cannes. “Well, this isn’t bad,” I thought to myself. “It registers as decent — if unspectacular — late Allen. It’s a little better than the unfairly trashed (indeed, unreleased in these territories) Scoop. But it’s not as funny as Anything Else.” You know what happened next. The picture became his most successful ever and secured an Oscar nomination for best picture (something it might have managed even if there were still only five nods).

  The picture was, of course, the latest of his adventures in Europe. Here we run up against an interesting anomaly in the world of criticism. The “foreign” pictures tend to get much better reviews in the United States than they receive on this side of the Atlantic. The absurdly sunny depictions of European capitals — most conspicuously London — jar with us, but continue to win over those in the US. Here’s a question that you won’t be bothered to answer: Has any film ever received such diverging reviews in the US and Europe as those handed out to Match Point? It got the living tar kicked out of it in the UK and Ireland, but was praised as a kind of masterpiece in the New World. I recently heard Barry Norman on the radio describing it as the worst ever Woody Allen film.

  Anyway, the pattern was broken somewhat by Midnight in Paris. We weren’t quite so keen on it. But it got pretty good reviews everywhere. Now, we move onto Italy for the film that was first titled The Bop Decameron, then Nero Fiddled and now To Rome With Love.

  We have a trailer. First things first. It is a delight to welcome Allen back as an actor. Even in his worst films, the Woodster raises a laugh. I chuckled out loud at the euro joke in the first few seconds of this promo. The fearsome Judy Davis has fared well in previous Allen projects and looks to offer a good foil to Mr Konigsberg in the new piece. If you object to Woody’s habit of employing younger actors to play versions of himself then you probably gave up on the career years ago. (Kenneth Branagh had a go in the fitful Celebrity. John Cusack played the part in Bullets Over Broadway. Owen Wilson was on hand with the “ums” and “ahs” in Midnight in Paris.) If, however, you’ve got used to the idea then you’ll surely agree that Jesse Eisenberg fits the bill quite nicely. I’ll buy that.

  The most worrying part of the trailer comes with the arrival of the guttural Penelope Cruz. No, no. no. He’s not back with the dubious trope of attaching a coarse, saucy sex worker to an erudite embarrassed intellectual. The joke at 1′ 38″ is among the worst he has ever written. I worry about that. I also worry slightly about experiencing another grossly romaticised version of a European city. That worked in Midnight in Paris because the film was, to some extent, about the notion of idealising cherished places and periods.

  Anyway, on balance, I retain my optimism about Woody Allen. The film may very well turn up at Cannes in May. But, surely, it would make more sense to postpone the June release and premiere it at Venice. That’s in Italy. Isn’t it?

   

• On losing it (and keeping it) as a director. Woody? Francis?

  June 26, 2010 @ 7:12 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Many British publications have had fun this week comparing the later career of Woody Allen with the autumn years of Francis Ford Coppola. Woody’s Whatever Works opened here this week also, but Coppola’s Tetro will not be with us until next Friday. We, therefore, won’t say too much about the latter just yet. It is, however, interesting to note how British critics — offered both films yesterday — treated the two great men. The general consensus is that FFC Lost It decades ago, whereas there is still something worth savouring in Allen’s career. Reviews of Allen’s European films on this side of the Atlantic were nowhere near as enthusiastic as they were in the US — last week, Barry Norman called Match Point the director’s “worst ever film” — but most everybody likes at least one of the New Yorker’s recent pictures. For the record, I got on very well with Deconstructing Harry and Something Else and felt that — while slight, familiar and dubious — Whatever Works is pretty darn funny throughout.

  So, Woody just about escapes the suggestion that he might have Lost It. That condition can be a terrible, terrible thing. When a director teeters over the edge, he almost never manages to claw his or her way back. Mind you, I feared  the Coens had entered the dark place when they made The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, but they  rose again with two of their very best films: No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man.

  Sometimes, in a director’s last few years, we glimpse just the thin end of the Losing-It wedge. In my estimation, Stanley Kubrick Lost It precisely half-way through Full Metal Jacket. The second half of that film was dodgy. Eyes Wide Shut played like a nervous breakdown made cinematic flesh. Lord alone knows how frightful the next film would have been. It’s a shame he didn’t live longer. But it seems unlikely we lost any more masterpieces.

  Every now and then, a director Loses It so badly that they go from being among the most thrilling creative presences of their time to genuine, bona fide menaces. The later career of Wim Wenders is so grim — Faraway So Close, Million Dollar Hotel, Don’t Come Knocking — that you find yourself questioning the brilliance of early masterpieces such as Alice in the Cities and The American Friend. In Don’t Look Now, Nic Roeg made one of the best films of the 1970s; In Puffball, he made one of the worst of the current century.

  Some versions of Losing It manifest themselves in such odd ways that they almost become valid independent art works. It’s been 40 years since Jean-Luc Godard moved from willful eccentricity to full-on, eye-swivelling, hyper-Marxist lunacy. The Cannes screening of his latest film, Film Socialisme, was like watching 2,000 people listening to a beloved friend babble insanely after his eighth pint of Pernod. Sure he made no sense, but it was still nice to have him around.

  The odd director experiences a slight decline, but still manages to produce material of interest. Roman Polanski’s The Ghost hardly bears comparison with Repulsion or Rosemary’s Baby. It is, however, a clever film that looks unlike the work of any other contemporary director. Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and Shutter Island don’t occupy the same exalted strata as The King of Comedy or Taxi Driver, but I’d still cross the road to see them again. (A narrow, quiet road anyway.)

  Every now and then — during the 1960s particularly — a film-maker appears to be abandoned by the era. A glance at Psycho, The Birds and (to a lesser extent) Marnie suggests that Hitchcock was near the height of his powers 50 years ago. Then he got swept along by contemporary film-making practices and by the voguish enthusiasm for spies. The problem with Topaz and Torn Curtain wasn’t that they were bad Hitchcock films; it was that they were barely Hitchcock films at all. When he returned home to the East End, he delivered a horrible minor masterpiece in Frenzy. If Mr Hitchcock lived longer, the great man might have fully recovered “it”. Billy Wilder, superb well into early old-age, also struggled with the social changes of the 1960s.

  So, let’s raise a cheer for those directors who appeared to weather the years with their talent largely undimmed. Here’s five.

  1. Ingmar Bergman
  Okay, he pretty much retired from films for the last 20 years of his life. But his last major feature, Fanny and Alexander, is among his very best films.

  2. Luis Buñuel
  The great surrealist’s final picture, made when he was 77, was That Obscure Object of Desire. Need we say more?

  3. Werner Herzog
  Still a mere youth at 67, but notable for never becoming any less eccentric or any less enthralling. Bad Lieutenant deserves a place beside Fitzcarraldo (if not quite beside Aguirre: Wrath of God). His documentaries are equally fabulous.

  4.David Cronenberg
  Also 67 and equally undimmed by the passing decades, David recently served up two impressively queasy gems with Eastern Promises and A History of Violence.

  5. Carl Theodor Dreyer
  Produced a masterpiece in the 1920s with The Passion of Joan of Arc . Produced a masterpiece in the 1960s with Gertrud. Then he died. You qualify, sir.

  

• Where are all the Easter films?

  April 2, 2010 @ 4:27 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  A few years back, there was a brilliant story in the papers describing how Somerfield, the British supermarket chain, had expressed weary surprise at how few children understood the true meaning of Easter. The press release went on — oddly for a firm that makes a fortune flogging Rolo Eggs — to bemoan the fact that these cretinous hoodies didn’t even grasp that the festival was a celebration of the the “birth of Christ”. Har, har!

  What morons! Ha! Easter is, of course, really about consuming enormous chocolate rabbits, watching vast amounts of sport and enjoying all the great Easter-themed films that Hollywood has provided down through the years. Like, er, um… Oh, you know.

  If the Churches want to confirm that Easter has not been entirely commercialised they need only observe how few Easter-themed films there are? Following the success of this year’s useless Valentine’s Day, it has been announced that the same team is about to begin work on a flick entitled New Year’s Day. Yet there seems little chance that gang of hooligans will make an Easter Sunday or a Good Friday. Against all the odds and despite the best efforts of Messrs Rowntree and Cadbury, the festival somehow remains focussed on religious mumbo-jumbo.

  There is, of course, the 1948 musical Easter Parade. The picture features a few top-notch Irving Berlin tunes — the title theme and A Couple of Swells in particular — but nobody is likely to prefer this middling Judy Garland piece to, say, Meet Me in Saint Louis or A Star is Born.

  And, of course, there is Mel Gibson’s The Passion. You may not like the underlying (indeed overlying) sense of religious mania, but you do have to admit it’s a very well-made film. It is, however, not really an Easter film in the way that It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas film. Ask anybody about his or her favourite Christmas movie scene and very few will mention a Nativity sequence from a biopic of J Christ. When we think of a Christmas film we tend to ponder the event as it has been celebrated in recent centuries, not (to use a phrase from superhero lexicon) the festival’s origin myth.

  You could, I suppose, claim The Long Good Friday. It’s one of the very best British gangster movies, but it could have been set at any time of the year. So that doesn’t really cut it either.

  I find myself reduced to considering the best Easter scene. Happily, that offers no great challenge. It has to be the sequence in Annie Hall in which the titular scatterbrain invites her conspicuously Jewish boyfriend to a terrifyingly Caucasian ham dinner at Easter. The significance is not lost on him. Enjoy…