In Which Cassandra's Dream Is The Name Of The Boat

The Real Thrill? Almost Losing

by MOLLY LAMBERT

It was Woody Allen who supposedly said "99% of life is showing up." Only nobody can ever remember what the percent is, I think it's actually 80%. And people almost always fuck up when quoting jokes that are not their own. Anyway I failed 80 to 99 percent of Woody Allen week by not showing up. I was waiting to see Whatever Works, but then Will reviewed it so I decided to watch Cassandra's Dream. Whatever works!

Comedy often comes out of a place of discomfort and frustration. Punchlines develop out from awkward truths. Rodney Dangerfield's catch phrase "I can't get no respect" is funny because sure, in a world that worships alpha males, Clint Eastwoods and Don Drapers, how is your average Rodney Dangerfield type schmuck supposed to catch a break? By being funny, of course. By mocking themselves before you get the chance, thereby setting themselves up as harmless, amicable, and clued-in.

Colin Farrell: "I think I did as many takes for this whole film as I did for one scene in Miami Vice" OOH MICHAEL MANN, YA BURNT!

The problem is that most of these dudes are still not that comfortable being themselves. Having won admiration through the alternate route of humor, they still long to be tall, handsome, and taken seriously. Perhaps Woody wishes he'd been blessed with the natural directing talent of somebody like Hitchcock, or that he'd been born with the good looks of Ewan McGregor or Colin Farrell.

"Oi Colin, look here" "Wot?" "I love you" "Wot?" "Nuffin."

Woody writes lower class UK characters like he's doing British Kitchen Sink film fan fiction. Which to be fair is exactly how I would write lower class UK characters. I believe the brothers are supposed to be Cockney, but Colin Farrell's clearly Irish accent slips out a lot. As a crime thriller, it's suspenseful enough, if not necessarily all that believable. As many of our reviewers noted, Woody's movies have never exactly taken place on a plane of realism. Why start now?

Some Things Woody Allen Loves

drives out to the country for a picnic

illicit sex during a party

chance encounters

climactic rainstorms

Scarlett Joho's bobolobos

adultery

mocking the craft of acting

small talk

murder

freshman psych

beautiful women

philosophy 101 bull sessions

In England Woody can more readily address the class issues that bubble up underneath America, which is otherwise mythologized as a meritocracy. Uncle Howard is the classic "wealthy relation" of fiction. The British discussion of class relations has always been public. In the fifties the discussion of "U and non-U" speech patterns, led by Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, newly compounded traditional British class consciousness.

Woody is obsessed with rich people, but his obsession is still one of petty jealousy mixed with hostile admiration. (You may have noticed this implicit worship of the wealthy in its trickledown to nineties indie scene auteurs like Noah Baumbach, Whit Stillman, and Wes Anderson).

Ian: Would you sleep with a director to get a part?
Angela: Well, that depends on the part, and who the director is, and how much I'd had to drink.
Ian: It's not a very comforting answer.
Angela: I didn't like the question.

Mostly Cassandra's Dream movie looks beautiful. Woody's recent European movies glow like the best soft-core porn ever made. There is a general haze of eroticism in this film too, as pervaded Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona. It's as if Woody, freed from the self-imposed constraint of making art about himself, becomes an entirely different filmmaker while speculating about the lives of beautiful people.

And it was really much better than I expected, perhaps because I expected so little. Colin Farrell really won me over with his role. I finally get his lunkhead shtick. Ewan McGregor was good too (is he ever not good?) and Tom Wilkinson gives a great menacing performance. Philip Glass's score is fantastic and there's nary a victrola needle to be heard. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She twitters here, and she tumbls here.

Woody Allen Week

by THIS RECORDING

Emily Gould on Manhattan...

Joan Didion and Woody Allen bickered like little keeds...

Karina Wolf welcomed us to the man we call Woody. That's him on the left.

Eleanor Morrow took on Melinda and Melinda:

Before Tyler I feel like we didn't really understand Annie Hall...

Sarah LaBrie handled the intricacies of Match Point...

The multi-talented Yvonne Puig on Crimes and Misdemeanors...

Molly went over a bunch of sequel talk...

Julie Klausner on Hannah and Her Sisters...

Chad Perman on Husbands and Wives...

Pauline Kael on Interiors...

Alex Carnevale on Mighty Aphrodite...

Woody Allen on his Jewish heritage...

Ben Arfmann on Radio Days...

Richard Corliss interviewed Woody in Time...

Marco Sparks on Manhattan Murder Mystery...

Jacob Sugarman on Broadway Danny Rose...

Georgia Hardstark on Hannah and Her Sisters...

You can visit the This Recording tumblr here, and the This Recording twitter here.

"Birds (live in Vienna)" - Sophia (mp3)

"Where Are You Now? (live in Vienna)" - Sophia (mp3)

"So Slow (live in Vienna)" - Sophia (mp3) highly recommended

In Which Hope Is Hope Get Used To It

Whatever Works If You Made Annie Hall

by WILL HUBBARD

In Woody Allen's new movie the main character Boris Yelnikoff tries to commit suicide twice, once landing on a piece of taut canvas and once on a woman that can see into the future. His life is a failure but he's got a great apartment; his friends are aging and moronic but everyone's still getting laid. The emotional stakes are so low that the movie's funniest aspect may be that Allen expects us to care when his protagonist falls in love.

Boris is played as well as could be expected by Larry David as Larry David for Woody Allen. It's hard to know what his character is trying to accomplish by repeating the inane phrase "Whatever works" over and over, though it's easy to understand what the filmmaker is implying—that it's possible to live godlessly if you have a single verbal statement that at least partially explains all human behavior. Like "There is no true God but God." Or "Are You Ready For Some Football?" Forrest Gump was too slow to believe in God but had dozens of these mantras, none of which made much sense either.

Let's take the comparison further, shall we? Both Boris Yelnikoff and Forrest Gump fall in love with a blonde Louisianan who uses them for money while fucking other dudes that either have AIDS or are actors living on boats. Both "tell it like it is." Both do not seem to be able to drive cars. The only difference I can think of is that one is a hyper-smart Jew and the other a retarded Gentile. Is the linear spectrum of intelligence actually a circle, like space-time?

All jokes aside, Allen's Boris does raise hard questions. The Hindu prophets gave us "there is the greatest misery in hope; in hopelessness is the height of bliss," but Boris seems to think he came up with it. He finds life chaotic, black, not simply devoid of hope but opposed to it. On the surface it's brave to write a character like this, but really, Woody, the only way to make him into good comedic cinema is for him to fall in love? One hopes that there could be another way.

And let us all agree that you should never get someone from one state in the South to mimic the accent of another Southern state, which is the crime Allen perpetrates in forcing Evan Rachel Wood, a North Carolinian, to pretend to be from Louisiana. She becomes more tolerable when she starts schtupping Larry David, uhhh Woody Allen, I mean Boris, but her incarnation as Melodie St. Ann Celestine will remain a miscasting for the ages.

Her mother, played by the elegant Patricia Clarkson, presents a more engaging problem—she's both whip-smart and completely benighted, an accurate Southerner to Ms. Wood's synagogue stereotype. As such her metamorphosis, just implausible and funny enough to constitute functional social parody, is one of the film's brighter points.

Larry David doing his best Woody Allen and a twelve year old asian girlI have read that people in the know don't really like this film. The Upper West Side audience with which I viewed it applauded loud and long, but I didn't make much of that reaction since they characterize the bulls-eye of the the film's marketing dartboard. My mother, who was also there with me and is a huge Woody fan, did not seem too impressed. I thought maybe she thought it was too darkly nihlistic, but she said later that it was Larry David that irked her, in a "two hour dose" rather than the thirty-minutes-broken-by-commercials one she's used to.

I thought to myself, hmmm. A Southern lady who watches Curb Your Enthusiasm, not exactly a snug-fitting peg in the Woody Allen's cosmology. But again, here as literally anywhere else, whatever works.

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. He tumbls right here.

You can visit the This Recording tumblr here, and the This Recording twitter here.

"You Have Been Loved" - George Michael (mp3)

"Kissing a Fool" - George Michael (mp3)

"I Can't Make You Love Me" - George Michael (mp3)

In Which The Simple Act of Death Itself Takes Hold

From a Time interview with critic Richard Corliss...

Woody, Ingmar, and Michelango

CORLISS: The insular Swede and the cosmopolitan Italian, dead on the same day.

ALLEN: Dreadful and astonishing. Two titanic film directors! Everyone here was shocked. Their work lives on, which just means their films are showing in a few places and sold on DVD. But the men are no longer with us, and that is tragic.

CORLISS: But Bergman was 89, Antonioni 94. They had a great run, and you have to think they got to say what they had to say.

ALLEN: Yes, they were not prematurely taken from our midst. Still, to me, the fact that it happens at all is sad, just terrible, tragic.

CORLISS: Your connection with Bergman is well known. Did you know Antonioni at all?

ALLEN: I knew him slightly and spent some time with him. He was thin as a wire and athletic and energetic and mentally alert. And he was a wonderful ping-pong player. I played with him; he always won because he had a great reach. That was his game.

CORLISS: But it's fair to say you're first and foremost a Bergman guy, and that you have been for 50 years. There were a lot of young people in the '50s who saw Bergman's films — usually it was The Seventh Seal — and were overwhelmed with an almost religious conversion. And the doctrine of this religion was that film was an art.

ALLEN: I agree. For me it was Wild Strawberries. Then The Seventh Seal and The Magician. That whole group of films that came out then told us that Bergman was a magical filmmaker. There had never been anything like it, this combination of intellectual artist and film technician. His technique was sensational.

CORLISS: After long admiring Bergman, you finally met him, through Liv Ullmann, who had starred in many of his films and lived with him for a few years.

ALLEN: He and I had dinner in his New York hotel suite; it was a great treat for me. I was nervous, I really didn't want to go. But he was not at all what you might expect: the formidable, dark, brooding genius. He was a regular guy. He commiserated with me about low box-office grosses and women and having to put up with studios.

Later, he'd speak to me by phone from his oddball little island [Faro, where Bergman lived his last 40 years]. He confided about his irrational dreams: for instance, that he would show up on the set and not know where to put the camera and be completely panic-stricken. He'd have to wake up and tell himself that he is an experienced, respected director and he certainly does know where to put the camera. But that anxiety was with him long after he had created 15, 20 masterpieces.

CORLISS: You knew he was Ingmar Bergman, but maybe he didn't. He didn't get to view his reputation from the outside.

ALLEN: Exactly. The world saw him as a genius, and he was worrying about the weekend grosses. Yet he was plain and colloquial in speech, not full of profound pronunciamentos about life. Sven Nykvist [his cinematographer] told me that when they were doing all those scenes about death and dying, they'd be cracking jokes and gossiping about the actors' sex lives.

CORLISS: You worked with Nykvist on four films. And you seem to share Bergman's work ethic.

ALLEN: I copied some of that from him. I liked his attitude that a film is not an event you make a big deal out of. He felt filmmaking was just a group of people working. At times he made two and three films in a year. He worked very fast; he'd shoot seven or eight pages of script at a time. They didn't have the money to do anything else.

CORLISS: One reason that boys of a certain age were enthralled by Bergman's films was that he had some of the world's most beautiful and powerful actresses in his repertory company: Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet and Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Liv Ullmann, Lena Olin. These were major mesmerizers, and they all worked for him.

ALLEN: He was obsessed with faces and had a wonderful way with women. He had an affinity for women that Tennessee Williams did. Some kind of closeness he felt. Their problems obsessed him.

CORLISS: One difference there is that Tennessee Williams didn't sleep with his leading ladies. Bergman was a famously imperious charmer, and had long liaisons with Harriet Andersson, then Bibi Andersson, then Liv Ullmann. There was a rumor that all seven actresses in his film All These Women were former Bergman mistresses.

ALLEN: That would not surprise me because, as I heard it from Sven, that's the way it was there. There was an enormous amount of socializing, and sexual and romantic escapades. It was a lighter situation than you would think. There's so much feeling on the screen that you think he had to have a serious life. But he was a ladies' man. He loved relationships with women.

CORLISS: Many film critics assign Bergman to a lower rank because, they say, he makes filmed plays. I don't see this as a limitation, but wouldn't you agree that he was essentially a film writer who directed his own work?

ALLEN: That could be said of me too. But you must also take a Bergman film like Cries and Whispers where there's almost no dialogue at all. This could only be done on film. He invented a film vocabulary that suited what he wanted to say, that had never really been done before. He'd put the camera on one person's face close and leave it there, and just leave it there and leave it there. It was the opposite of what you learned to do in film school, but it was enormously effective and entertaining.

CORLISS: OK. So you think he's great, and I think he's great. But to many young people — I mean bright, film-savvy kids — he's Ingmar Who? What relevance do his films have today?

ALLEN: I think his films have eternal relevance, because they deal with the difficulty of personal relationships and lack of communication between people and religious aspirations and mortality, existential themes that will be relevant a thousand years from now. When many of the things that are successful and trendy today will have been long relegated to musty-looking antiques, his stuff will still be great.

CORLISS: But not many artists worry about God's silence these days. In the media the current battle is between militant believers and devout atheists. You get very few tortured agnostics.

ALLEN: You're right. That was his obsession. He was brought up religiously and it wasn't simply a question of atheism or not. He longed for the possibility of religious phenomenon. That longing tortured him his whole life. But in the end he was a great entertainer. The Seventh Seal, all those films, they grip you. It's not like doing homework.

CORLISS: If someone who hadn't seen any of his films asked you to recommend just five, what would be your Bergman starter set?

ALLEN: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, Cries and Whispers and Persona.

CORLISS: Many directors would be happy to have made just those five films.

ALLEN: Or one of them.

"Fanta" - Hot Chip (mp3)

"I Do" - Hot Chip (mp3)

"Boy from School (Erol Alkan's remix)" - Hot Chip (mp3)