Comedy is easy, getting murdered is easier.

How does Woody Allen get away with murder?

Allen writes and directs CRIMES AND MISDEMANORS, and let’s the murderer get away with it – as long as the murderer comes to a reconciliation with himself! By all accounts, isn’t that the most important realization that any human could have? It’s in all the media, all the biblical teachings, all the girly songs: Finding yourself – even if you find you’re a murderer – is the best discovery of all. Sunshine, orchestra swell, tears…

Having found his stride in this movie, Allen would get away with murder again in his brilliant MATCH POINT (2006).

Martin Landau is respected ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal, whose affair with the fiery Dolores (Anjelica Huston) threatens to disrupt his family life when Dolores, uh, threatens to disrupt his family life, if Judah will not confess his affair to his wife (Clair Bloom).

In the B-story, Allen has planted himself as moviemaker Cliff Stern, infatuated with artistic free spirit producer Halley (Mia Farrow), cultivating her through the counter-intuitive method of inviting her to view one of his film projects – raw footage of a philosophy professor (Martin Bergmann playing Professor Louis Levy so convincingly, his footage looks lifted from the History Channel or National Geographic). Halley and Cliff hang out watching old movies together and chatting cinema esoterica; they both work for blowhard producer Lester (Alan Alda), who is cultivating Halley the old-fashioned way – bluntly trying to fuck her. And Cliff is married (to unexciting Joanna Gleason).

The great thing about Woody Allen is that he always asks the “big” questions in his films. Even his comedies explore these biggies, shot through the prism of dark humor. Through his Levy footage, Allen the writer explores the metaphysical nature of love and morality, even as events unfold in the movie to reflect Levy’s musings. (And on a side note, I love the way all Allen’s characters are smart. Not only displayed through their dialogue, but when we walk into any of their houses, we see their massive bookcases filled with books. I love that! How did this writer-director-star ever flourish in an industry – in a world – intent on catering to the Great Unwashed? CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS was nominated for numerous Academy, Golden Globes and BAFTA awards; the first film to win the 2010 20/20 Award for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor; numerous other awards and nominations coming its way. Score one for Team Smart.)

You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox is that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.
— Professor Levy (character)

While Cliff is busy falling in old-fashioned love, Judah (Landau) is desperate to preserve his family, resorting to calling his underworld brother (Jerry Orbach) to “fix” the mistress situation. It is not as cut-and-dried as it sounds, as Judah is torn morally, rent spiritually throughout the process, and in a daze, actually visits the murder site after the fact, seeing his mistress’s twisted, bloodied body on the floor, long before anyone in the world knows of her demise. It’s a fantastic take on something we’ve grown inured to over the years in movies – premeditated murder.

And with Cliff we see a situation all too familiar to us: the shy guy (Cliff) more intellectually appropriate for the woman than the arrogant rich showoff (Lester) – but the woman ending up with the showoff. After all the cultivating Cliff enacts on Halley, all it takes is money and power to have her proclaiming about the showoff, “He’s really a sweet guy!”

As with all Woody Allen movies, a simple plot outline does not suffice for the intelligence of the dialogue, the richness of his character interrelationships, and their movement among life’s complicated tapestry. Neither does it convey Allen’s razorwire delivery of comedic one-liners sprinkled mad-hatter throughout his scenes whether they be tragic, philosophical or even – comedic.

In the end, Judah sits with Cliff at a party they both happen to be attending. Being ambiguous about actual events, Judah feels compelled to tell Cliff his story and its outcome, of how he suddenly felt at peace with himself, even though he had committed a heinous act. It’s a brain-twisting wink to the audience – here’s the star telling the writer the plot of his own movie back to himself as the actor. And here’s the director as the character playing devil’s advocate and trying to find holes in his other character’s moral relativism. Is this the height of narcissistic conceit or a ménage à trois?

And then for Judah and Cliff to resign themselves to the fact that life has no happy endings; that a man must eventually pay for all his crimes and misdemeanors. Judah laments: “If you want a happy ending, you should go see a Hollywood movie.” But this is a happ– and this is a Hollywood mov– ahhh, my brain is twisted…

We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions. Moral choices. Some are on a grand scale. Most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are in fact the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying, and even to find joy from simple things like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.
— Professor Levy (character)

Remember, these aren’t the words of a real philosopher, these are not platitudes handed down from Freud’s era, or established in philosophical canon – these are the words of a grand filmmaker. These are the words of Woody Allen.

Now go, and may all your crimes and misdemeanors be reconciled…

END

The Artistic Mind is a Terrible Thing to View.

The scenes show what interesting characters the characters are – but it also shows what an interesting character Quentin is.
— Christoph Waltz, 2013 interview for DJANGO UNCHAINED.

Writer-director Woody Allen‘s early work certainly has two main gears: dark and absurd. The absurd gear drives comedies like SLEEPER, LOVE AND DEATH, ZELIG, et al, while his dark gear (which – let’s face it – also drives his comedies) showcases not just society’s tribulations, but his own dark interior.

INTERIORS follows the fortunes of three sisters whose mother is tipping into unbalanced due to her sudden late-life divorce. It is uncomfortable, visceral, intelligent and disturbing.

The luminous Diane Keaton is Renata, clinical Mary Beth Hurt is Joey and the youngest is Kristin Griffith as Flyn, playing a glamorous movie star, yet for me, Keaton outshines her for beauty, brains and cute buck teeth. Richard Jordan and a young Sam Waterston play two of the husbands. Dark vulture mother is Geraldine Page as Eve, bravely coming across as that irritating, pokey mother-in-law who turns up unannounced and begins critiquing your husband’s choice of furniture.

Eve is an interior decorator trying to get back into the swing after her husband (and father of her three daughters), Arthur (E.G. Marshal), divorces her. We can see she is fooling herself into believing she’s doing fine, while through the discussions of her daughters we know she’s slipping into madness.

Meanwhile, Arthur has just returned from gallivanting overseas with his new young wife (well, young-er) Pearl (played with ignorant bliss by Maureen Stapleton). At a family dinner thrown by the three daughters, they look upon her with disdain as a vulgarian, as she misses the points of philosophical discussions that the girls and their husbands easily lapse into.

And here is where we find the beauty in Woody Allen movies: No one ever has to explain or qualify why they are educated! Let me clarify: in most modern movies, if a character says something remotely intelligent or “scientific” they  immediately qualify it with “I read it in National Geographic” or “I saw it on a science program once.” In Allen’s movies, we take it for granted these people are educated due to their professions and their dialogue, and – even better – he takes it for granted we are educated and never talks down to us through his characters, or insults us with qualifications.

These characters are artists, writers, critics; they may even be considered elitist, but I ask you, in a First World society doing their damnedest best to remain UN-educated and reveling in their ignorance, how can an educated person not feel elitist?

The best insight that Allen captures in INTERIORS is the Artist’s dissatisfaction with finished works. No matter how good it is intrinsically, or how well it is received publicly, why is one never satisfied with one’s work once it is created? All the characters here, though relatively successful, seem unfulfilled (except for Arthur, who is gettin’ it on with that raving dunce), and Allen captures that ineffable feeling of post-creation that every Artist experiences, for all their works. When we see these scenes play out – with Joey and Renata complaining to their husbands how they feel like they’ve missed something in the finalization of their work, how Renata’s husband feels self-loathing after publishing his book, etc. we realize that once a creation is stamped as “completed” and released to the public, all the further ideas that might have gone into that creation to improve it must necessarily be stultified, or the Artist would go insane with regret. You never feel like stamping anything “final” yet if you didn’t, you would never have any product.

Not only is this an insight into the mind of the Artist, we can feel touch taste these words coming directly from the mind of Allen. We start to question if he felt that post-creation anxiety with the production of this very film. I’m sure he did – but not for the reasons you may think. INTERIORS is sparse, with no soundtrack, and there are no cutesy camera tricks. (In LOVE AND DEATH, Allen satirized Bergman, here he pays stylistic homage to Bergman.) That’s not what Allen would be anxious about. His film tells a story – of a suicidal mother and her daughters’ efforts to palliate her loneliness while also reconciling with their father’s new lifestyle – and within that story, a wild concept of artistic dissatisfaction; a film so insightful that it doesn’t need cutesy camera tricks. Allen would be feeling anxiety on whether he got that MESSAGE across lucidly. He can never “add” to it now that the film is complete.

In that Woody Allen stammer that we know and love so well, we can imagine him checking off aspects he may have missed: Did he get that point across about the Artist’s self-doubt? Did he convey all the myriad meanings in the word INTERIORS – how it describes the mother’s profession, whilst describing the film looking inwards at the family, whilst describing the characters as being stuck inside themselves (always looking out at an ideal world they can never attain), whilst also very prosaically referring to the inside of the daughters’ house they grew up in?…

Yes, Woody, I think we got it, you goddam genius.

END

Ménage à Ted.

What happens when two MILFs discover they’re bonking the same man? Unbridled pouting.

In JUST BETWEEN FRIENDS, MILF #1, Sandy (Christine Lahti), befriends MILF #2, her aerobics instructor Holly (TV legend Mary Tyler Moore), only to discover, through a series of mildly comic circumstances, that they are both involved with the same man – #2’s husband, Chip (Ted Danson).

Sam Waterston is Chip’s unassuming shy pal, who is the “fourth wheel” in this farce that turns poignant and then strangely detached. As a not-so-subtle metaphor, Chip is a seismologist, always talking about aftershocks, which is exactly what these people experience after the big affair reveals.

For all the dire circumstances these characters are put through, I can’t figure whether they are acting “realistic” in their detachment, or just not getting crazy enough to be believable. Written and directed by Allan Burns, FRIENDS has to get very tragic for its ironies to play themselves out.

Plot points you can see coming: single mother Sandy laments that she would like to get pregnant but there are no suitable men about (the type of talk that inspires a man to leave the room in a daze of hyper-boredom) – and finds that Holly’s husband has made her pregnant.

Plot points you can’t see coming, but that don’t matter anyway: Sam Waterston’s character is so shy you wonder how he ever got married, let alone sired a child, yet after innumerable jump cuts, we catch up with him divorced, with a hefty beard, and involved with the two MILFs almost as intimately as Chip was.

Shots of both MILFs in tight aerobics gear or tiny panties should keep this film interesting to a demographic not yet worried about mortgages.

END

“Yes, Officer, third from the left. That’s the man I saw with the bloody gloves getting into the white Bronco…”

Idiotic fodder for Moon Landing conspiracy theorist idiots.

As a child in Australia, I remember seeing posters for CAPRICORN ONE: the visage of the lone, space-suited astronaut, movie title scrawled across his glare-shield. Something foreboding and sobering about that poster had me believing (as I attained full cucumberhood) that the film was one of the all-time greats, placed alongside 2001:  A SPACE ODYSSEY, or PLANET OF THE APES, or SEVEN SAMURAI; a movie that rankled sensibilities and incited societal disturbance… Upon recently viewing for the first time this insipid, miscast, paranoiac, clueless attempt at professional film-making, I now realize it would more suitably rank alongside ERNEST SCARED STUPID, or GAMERA VS. GAOS., or MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE.

The concept might have been brilliant, were it not for the dogged naïveté exhibited by the screenwriters and technical personnel, all of whom, it is patently obvious, have never even push-buttoned a blender from Wal-Mart, let alone worked or even been allowed near the fail-safe redundant systems inherent in the NASA space flight program.

Poff-Scam

A manned mission to Mars is subverted by the very organization that launches it – NASA. Apparently, the Mars capsule’s life-support system would have failed, killing the three astronauts (a boring Sam Waterston, an ineffectual James Brolin and an as-yet-unindicted O.J. Simpson). In an inspired asinine turn, instead of mathematically proving that they had the grounds to sue the vendors who created the faulty system, NASA executives decide to waste incalculable time and energy on staging a fake landing on a studio set, in order to keep receiving funding for the mission; duplicity which doesn’t rectify any problems, save any money, or justify any effort, whilst confining the astronauts against their will, away from the public, for the duration of the “mission.”

The ruse goes swimmingly – with Earth’s media actually buying the fakery, which begs a treatise on stupidity at least as extensive as an Encyclopedia Britannica 24-volume set – until the returning Mars rocket explodes on re-entry and NASA realizes that, in order to continue the ruse, the astronauts have to “disappear” – but now NASA’s going to kill them themselves! ‘Twould be bittersweet irony if it weren’t so damn retarded.

The underlying motive behind all government collusion of this ilk is that massive profits be gleaned from the deception. But even with the aforementioned funding, the cover-up costs alone for such a slipshod conspiracy’s execution would far outweigh any reimbursement brought about by legal income. And that’s considering that the cover-up was a success – the fake mission itself was so sophomorically staged that it could’ve been picked apart by any first-year actor pretending to be a lawyer in any court of law at any time.

Writer-Director Peter Hyams‘s story-telling incompetence is astounding to behold: to fool the whole flight-ops crew and the media into believing the mission is underway, the conspirators “replay the radio transmissions of the astronauts’ recorded trial runs over the intercom.” Would this fool anyone remotely cognizant of human communication, let alone every single veteran technician in constant contact with the Mars spacecraft? Hyams likes to think we’re stupid enough to believe so. Hal Holbrook (as the NASA executive helming the conspiracy) almost seems embarrassed when he voices this idiocy.

Conspiracy Theorists must have thrown a week-long booze-up when this movie hit cinemas, cries of “We told you so!” reverberating off their Lonely-Guy hobbit-hole walls, postered with tech specs, affidavits, diagrams and blurry photos all “proving” that the Moon landings were faked as well.

Hyams’s decision to place NASA – one of the few truly respected, sorely under-funded, genuinely intellectually adroit institutions on Earth – at the heart of this conspiracy is defamation of the highest degree. And then (like the Moon-Fakers) to afford them not one jot of respect, by performing exactly zilch amount of research in the field of manned space missions. Technical malfeasance is elevated to art, as scene after scene insults audience intelligence by trying to sneak in any budget generic hardware or scenery or gadget that looks “scientific” and by sprinkling the dialogue with any technical terms that sound scientific to further the ill-contrived illusion. Trust me – it’s all bogus. There is no single area where one can begin to effectively critique the lack of dedication towards any kind of plausibility which would lever this film above that of cack wedged between the treads of my shoe.

Intermittent snappy dialogue between Elliott Gould (when he was still a leading man) and cross-eyed Karen Black is the only respite in a film overburdened with superfluous dialogue (OJ Simpson talking to himself as he collapses in the desert), pointless dialogue (“I’m four steps from the bottom, I’m three steps from the bottom, I’m two steps from the bottom,” as a crewman descends to the “Martian” surface), and downright idiotic dialogue (Telly Savalas‘s opening lines, and all the “technical” claptrap).

The most dangerous aspect of a hideously-deformed piece of trash like this film is the overwhelming sludge of misinformation it purveys. Use the time you would have wasted on this movie reading a book by Carl Sagan or Richard P. Feynman. Not only will you be more entertained – ya might jess learn yaself sumpin’. 

END