I want to ask you a question. I need you to be honest, here. If you're cheating, you only cheat yourself. Have you ever heard the word "Obsequious"?
I'll rephrase, have you ever heard the word "Obsequious" in anything that was written after Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) was born?
Well, I didn't. Not until I saw the latest attempt of a film by Woody Allen. this highly anticipated film starts with a pleasant enough scenario. Two writers sit in a restaurant and pontificate as to the nature of the human life. One writer claims that life is a tragic play with a bitter and inevitable end. The other, however, sees the life as a hothouse for comic subtleties. The attempt to solve the dispute is, basically, the essence of the film where a story about a girl that crashes to a dinner party is divided to a tragic story of a woman that doesn't seem to get a break and a comedy about a woman who is looking for a true love when the one who loves her is a non employed actor who talks uncannily like Woody himself (Will Ferrel in an excellent and unmatched performance).
I must admit that the plot led me to believe that Woody Ellen had struck gold. I still believe that is true. The problem is that Woody Ellen sat down and wrote the script before he had a chance to recover enough shiny chunks of metal and stirred it with whatever he dug with his verbal shovel.
In the tragic version, Melinda, an ex-con, talks to her delicate-soul pianist boyfriend, Ellis (Chiwetel Ejiofor which I remember fondly from his wonderful performance in "Dirty pretty things") as though she had spent her entire life inside ARTE (a French-German art and Jazz TV Channel). At one point, I felt like screaming at the screen that nobody talks like that outside Woody's Bizarro world of bored suave people but I restrained myself.
After all, it would be highly non-obsequious of me.
Somewhere during the film it dawned on me that the great performance of Will Ferrel whose character is the only well-written and superbly acted one in the film, accentuates the major flaw of the film. Woody uses obsolete music, writes superficial smug characters that no man can relate to and worst of all, ignores the fact that the tragedy isn't shot nor written like one and neither does the comedy and halfway through the film it becomes impossible to tell them apart.
All these factors and few others turn the film into the "Sliding doors" where Gwyneth Paltrow is replaced with Radha Mitchell, London's west end is replaced with Manhattan and the ingenious script of Peter Howitt is replaced with the least believable, pseudo intellectual, gut wrenching yammering that only bored yuppies could utter without getting convulsions.
Woody Ellen made great films in the past (Annie hall, Sleeper) and even in the not so distant past (Mighty Aphrodite, Sweet and Lowdown) but in this film it seems that Woody had let his guard down and lowered his own bar of perfectionism. This striving for a flawless script is what made him the most Oscar nominated screenwriter in film history and, in my opinion, the only approach to write a comedy (or anything else, for that matter).
I liked the agile ending, though.
5 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter.
I'll rephrase, have you ever heard the word "Obsequious" in anything that was written after Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) was born?
Well, I didn't. Not until I saw the latest attempt of a film by Woody Allen. this highly anticipated film starts with a pleasant enough scenario. Two writers sit in a restaurant and pontificate as to the nature of the human life. One writer claims that life is a tragic play with a bitter and inevitable end. The other, however, sees the life as a hothouse for comic subtleties. The attempt to solve the dispute is, basically, the essence of the film where a story about a girl that crashes to a dinner party is divided to a tragic story of a woman that doesn't seem to get a break and a comedy about a woman who is looking for a true love when the one who loves her is a non employed actor who talks uncannily like Woody himself (Will Ferrel in an excellent and unmatched performance).
I must admit that the plot led me to believe that Woody Ellen had struck gold. I still believe that is true. The problem is that Woody Ellen sat down and wrote the script before he had a chance to recover enough shiny chunks of metal and stirred it with whatever he dug with his verbal shovel.
In the tragic version, Melinda, an ex-con, talks to her delicate-soul pianist boyfriend, Ellis (Chiwetel Ejiofor which I remember fondly from his wonderful performance in "Dirty pretty things") as though she had spent her entire life inside ARTE (a French-German art and Jazz TV Channel). At one point, I felt like screaming at the screen that nobody talks like that outside Woody's Bizarro world of bored suave people but I restrained myself.
After all, it would be highly non-obsequious of me.
Somewhere during the film it dawned on me that the great performance of Will Ferrel whose character is the only well-written and superbly acted one in the film, accentuates the major flaw of the film. Woody uses obsolete music, writes superficial smug characters that no man can relate to and worst of all, ignores the fact that the tragedy isn't shot nor written like one and neither does the comedy and halfway through the film it becomes impossible to tell them apart.
All these factors and few others turn the film into the "Sliding doors" where Gwyneth Paltrow is replaced with Radha Mitchell, London's west end is replaced with Manhattan and the ingenious script of Peter Howitt is replaced with the least believable, pseudo intellectual, gut wrenching yammering that only bored yuppies could utter without getting convulsions.
Woody Ellen made great films in the past (Annie hall, Sleeper) and even in the not so distant past (Mighty Aphrodite, Sweet and Lowdown) but in this film it seems that Woody had let his guard down and lowered his own bar of perfectionism. This striving for a flawless script is what made him the most Oscar nominated screenwriter in film history and, in my opinion, the only approach to write a comedy (or anything else, for that matter).
I liked the agile ending, though.
5 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter.