Despite my own fuzzy sense of positive outlook on everything, I immensely enjoy these films and probably get some kind of delight in making fun of these poor characters who seem to have everything but happiness.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
vicky cristina barcelona
Woody Allen has done it again - another funny movie with a very sour view of humanity. Or at least a sour view of wealthy white jetsetting New York elite humanity. Despite the breezy and yellow-hued feel of this film, it has an undercurrent of pessimism about the way people make choices that lead them (knowingly) to doom. I might be overstating it a little bit, but when I see some of his latest films (Match Point most clearly comes to mind, but also Cassandra's Dream), I see a few innocent people caught up in the tragic circumstances of someone else's bad choices, but even more people caught up in their own bad choices when they have the ability to knowingly make the right ones. Allen makes fun of conformist society elites and the "creative drifter" type who is just the other side of the same coin - a person who lives a romantic ideal that tries to be the opposite of conformity but is actually its own kind of unsatisfactory conformity.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I saw this film at the Red Vic in SF a number of months ago and loved it. Penelope Cruz was incredible, but she's far from the only wonderful part. It's funny, I actually didn't perceive it as being pessimistic, in fact, I got a sort of realistic optimism. One thing I like about it, and about some of Woody Allen's other movies, is that he's not overtly judgmental of his characters while he shows them in their peculiarity and faultiness. I felt caught up in Scarlet Johanssen's character, even though she was far from perfect, I felt trapped like her friend (I'm forgetting which one was which), even though I honestly didn't like her. But still, I felt like they were all doing the best with what had been handed to them (their circumstances, their social circles, their own personalities), and that felt uplifting. Or maybe I just like a well-told story (there's no doubt that WA is a superb story-teller). But there's something else, I would go so far as to say that I felt inspired by the film, inspired to truthfulness and loyalty to my own intuition. Crazy, I know, a crazy response for a film that's so positively unromantic while carrying with it all the trappings of romance. I am so enjoying Woody Allen these days. He's descriptive and loyal to his characters, and I'm rarely disappointed.
Post a Comment