Woody's latest - you could do worse

It took a while but Woody Allen’s latest movie, A Rainy Day in New York – his 53^rd - has finally been released, at least online. It’s not his best but it’s not his worst either. In fact, it’s a fairly enjoyable romp and many another filmmaker might be satisfied to make something almost as enjoyable. It’s fluff but it’s Woody Allen fluff. The reason for the film’s delay? The quarter century old allegations against Allen for his alleged sexual abuse (never proven) of adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow, which came to the fore at the height of the Me Too movement. Finished in 2018 Amazon Studios shelved the film and nixed a contract with Allen for three other movies. It was the first year since 1981 a film by Allen had not been released. Allen sued for breach of contract and the two parties settled. The movie can now be rented online. If I have one criticism of Rainy Day, it’s that it treads well known Allen territory. Of course, it’s yet another paean to Allen’s beloved New York City. Its characters are rich, intellectual, cultured. And its principal character Gatsby Welles (Timothée Chalamet) is the latest stand in for Allen himself. In the plot, Welles is a bright eccentric but bored student at a liberal arts college (he calls it “Forest Lawn University”) in Upstate New York. One day his GF Ashleigh Enright (Elle Fanning) gets an assignment from the school newspaper to go to New York and interview famed film director Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber). Welles, a native New Yorker who longs for home, decides to make a weekend of it and show off the Tucson-bred Enright what he loves about his city. Enright conducts her interview yet gets caught up in spending an afternoon with the angst-ridden director, checking out his latest film rushes, and eventually meeting actor Francisco Vega (Diego Luna) who invites her out for drinks. The delays frustrate Welles, who’d planned a romantic weekend, no end. But he bumps into an old friend on the street making a film and is asked to stand in for a brief scene. He has to kiss actress Chan Tyrell (Selena Gomez). Her sarcasm notwithstanding, they hit it off. Rainy Day is replete with charming scenes of Manhattan, and the script is typical Allen with its witticisms of pop and elite culture: ”One thing about New York, you can’t achieve this level of anxiety, hostility and paranoia anywhere else - it’s really exhilarating”, “the word on Amy was that she performed oral sex at a bar mitzvah” and about Welles’ affluent mother’s book club: “The out of work discussing the out of print.” As I say, the flick is a rehash of a typically Allen plot, his ingrained character types and predictably quirky scenes - romantic misunderstandings, minor absurdities, erudite life lessons. And it does make you wonder if he’s exhausted creative story ideas. But, really, you could do worse than watching this on a rainy afternoon. 

More Pinter and theatre made for film

 More on the cavalcade of Harold Pinter films recently offered on the Criterion Channel. Unlike the films reviewed in last week’s post, the two films I’m reviewing here were actually films of stage plays. These were produced by a fascinating company Ely Landau's American Film Theatre. This was an American company that in the early 1970s was formed to make reproductions of often avant-garde theatre restaged for the camera. These filmed stage plays were shown at theatres across America. The two presented by Criterion are Butley and The Homecoming.

Butley (1974) was directed by Pinter based on the play by Simon Gray. It’s an astonishing tour de force of acting by Alan Bates. Bates plays a private college English teacher, Ben Butley, specializing in T. S. Eliot. The play is a day in the life of this tormented but extraordinarily eccentric character. And he’s a verbal fire hose, spouting a virtually non-stop fusillade of philosophically laced sardonic wit on any person or subject he decides to ruminate about. For example, commenting on nicking his face shaving: “It’s no pleasure slicing open my chin with my estranged wife’s razor blade - the symbolism may be deft, but the memory still smarts.” Any thought of reconciliation with said spouse? “I’m a one-woman man and I’ve had mine, thank you.” And, to a student accusing him of being rude. “That’s another way of taking the fun out of teaching.” Bates’s performance is electrifying and breathtaking and I guess I hadn’t seen anything quite like it. 

The Homecoming (1973). This is the only title in the series that actually films (d. peter Hall) an original Pinter play, one of his most famous. Pinter said this about his plays, “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal and what is true and what is false….It can be true and false.” And “our beginnings never know our ends.” The Homecoming is about an English working-class father and his three sons. Paul Rogers as the dominating Max, who alternately growls commands and upbraids his sons for their shortcomings. Yet the dynamics are constantly changing as a son might align with another against the father or with Max against his siblings. Everyone seems to be manipulating each other. Son Teddy (Michael Jayston) and his wife Ruth (Vivien Merchant, FYI Pinter’s first spouse) visit from America. Ruth seems placid. Yet, when tested, she reduces Len (Ian Holm) from intimidator to groveller. In Pinter’s plays, superficiality is the flip side of profundity, appearances are deceptive and subterranean forces like the id emerge as motivating factors. If the play at times seems absurd (ie., Ruth’s abrupt departure from her husband) mind the deeper forces at work. 

All Pinter all the time

 
My favorite playwright is Harold Pinter, perhaps England’s most famous post-war stage author whose dramas, to my mind, psychologically break apart human relationships and interpersonal dynamics in the way Picasso visually disassociates the human figure. Whenever I’ve had a chance to catch a Pinter play, I’ve made a beeline to the theatre. This was largely in London, England and one time at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Unfortunately, Pinter’s plays are shown few and far between. But this week the Criterion Channel released 10 films either of his plays or films for which he wrote the screenplay, another talent in Pinter’s extensive oeuvre. However, only one is an actual Pinter play, The Homecoming. The rest are screenplays based on other people's novels. But, hey, I'll take what I can get. 

The first film was The Go-Between (1971), directed by Pinter’s close associate in filmmaking, Joseph Losey. The period piece stars two British actors in their prime – Alan Bates and Julie Christie - as surreptitious lovers circa 1900 in a kind of pre-Downton Abbey era. A young boy, Leo (Dominic Guard), on vacation at the palatial estate, is recruited by Lady Trimingham (Christie) and next-door farmer Ted Burgess (Bates) to carry letters between them scheduling, well, illicit rendezvous. I almost never miss a film starring Christie and Bates but this narrative, though well-acted, is rather plodding but in part is redeemed by an exquisite score from the French composer Michel Legrand.

Accident (1967) also directed by Losey with text by Pinter, has another of my British faves of the period (and someone again whose films I never miss), Dirk Bogarde. Bogarde plays Stephen, a don at an Oxford college, who covets a student (Jacqueline Sassard), who is actually having an affair with his best friend Charley (Stanley Baker). Meanwhile Stephen himself engages in some extra-sexual activity with a former flame. His wife, Rosalind (Vivien Merchant), pregnant, seems to take it all in stride in this study of middle-class hypocrisy. Oh yes, another fave English actor of the period, Michael York as William (and Anna’s alleged fiancé), brings literally a sardonic smirk to his character. Again, a good score, this time mellow jazz by John Dankworth.

The Servant (1963). Bogarde makes an appearance again as Losey directs in this classic, starring another British period icon, Sarah Miles, and “introducing” James Fox. What is the story about? I’ve seen the movie perhaps four times and I think it’s about class conflict and homosexuality – but only maybe. Bogarde’s Hugo is a “manservant” for Fox’s Tony, an up and coming real estate developer. But Hugo, as they would say today, doesn’t respect “boundaries” and begins offering unsolicited opinions and physically rearranging his master’s house. Susan (Wendy Craig), Tony’s fiancé, resents this intrusion and browbeats him. But Hugo has his revenge with alleged sister Vera (Miles). You’d think that would be the end of it, but it isn’t, and there is a very surprising coda. Again, great jazz by Dankworth and Cleo Laine croons repeatedly the song All Gone.

Finally, The Pumpkin Eater (1964), this time directed by Jack Clayton and written by Pinter starring Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft. Finch, who plays a screenwriter, marries into Jo’s (Bancroft) family of six children from previous marriages. He immerses himself in the raucous household until, well, he doesn’t. His distancing – enabled by his affairs – undermines Jo’s exuberance and eventual mental stability. This is the third Bancroft film I’ve seen in a couple of weeks and her range is amazing. Here she’s an Englishwoman through and through. But in another recently seen film, Melvin Frank’s 1975 The Prisoner of Second Avenue, she’s a stereotypical raw-speaking Manhattanite. And of course she's Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (Mike Nichols 1967).

More Pinter in next week's post. 

My, ahem, connections to James Bond and Emma Peel

 

Yes, I agree with seemingly everybody, Sean Connery, who sadly died at 90 last week, was not only the original but the definitive Bond. His masculinity, fortitude, uprightness and suave demeanor not only set the tone for the Bond series over future decades but burned into our minds the image of the real James Bond, a kind of psychological outline that dwelled within whatever actor – and many were extremely good – who played Bond in the years to come. As I started writing this, I mistakenly used the name James Bond as if Bond himself had died – that’s how important Connery’s persona as Bond was. With Connery’s death we have now lost two of the greatest actors of the post war generation – Connery and Diana Rigg, also a famed Brit of film and stage, who died at 82 in September. Rigg as Emma Peel was perhaps the modern era’s best role model of an independent, intelligent – and witty - and formidable female, who also as it happened starred in a spy drama series, this being The Avengers (1961-69). But, like Connery, she transcended that role to become a seminal actress for the ages (and to modern audiences perhaps best known as Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones). My personal connections to both? Well, not much. But several years ago, I was on a road trip through the Swiss Alps. Our car was climbing the famed Furka Pass when I saw a small sign stating “James Bond Str” (Strasse or Street). James Bond? Yes, perhaps the most famous scene of Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton 1964) takes place on a few of several of the pass’s very elongated switchbacks where Tilly (Tania Mallet) tries shooting down at Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) but almost hits Bond on the switchback in between. Our car climbed that section only to blow a hose near the top and we were stranded opposite the Hotel Belvédère, a 19^th century classic hotel and now

presumably permanently closed. (We were eventually rescued by the Swiss equivalent of AAA.)  As for Peel, last month I was in Montreal and doing one of my favorite walks, down the stairs from another belvedere, this one looking over downtown Montreal from the top of Mount Royal. The stairway takes you down the mountain’s south side and into the streets of downtown, onto Peel Street to be exact. Ever since a kid growing up in Montreal at the time of The Avengers – one of my favorite TV shows and Emma Peel a definitive heartthrob – I associated Peel Street with Emma Peel. And, descending into the Montreal métro (subway), the Peel metro station embodies to my mind the pop art so indicative of the mid-to-late, aka Swinging Sixties. The station has large multicolored mosaic circles designed by artist Jean-Paul Mousseau and bold solid colored illuminated circles embedded in walls along the waiting platform. With this pop art, if you will, the Peel station, and Emma Peel, were all merged in a young fan’s mind.

Back to the (not so great) past

 

New Orleans is one of those places where the decay of the bayou mingles with death (think the classic New Orleans jazz funeral), and voodoo and witchcraft haunts the streets of the French Quarter and Garden District. An appropriate setting, therefore, for the co-directing team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead and the latest in their horror genre of character-driven stories that have very humanistic and philosophical edges - Synchronic, which opened in theatres, drive-ins and VOD this weekend. Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) are EMTs working the overnight shift where they respond to a series of gruesome calls where people have died or are deeply traumatized. Turns out a new designer drug has been going around: Synchronic, which, believe it or not, takes people back in time. If only we could pop a pill for the experience, right? Well, Steve, who’s diagnosed with brain cancer and fears his days are numbered, decides to experiment. And it might make him find his buddy Dennis’s recently lost daughter, Brianna (Ally Ioannides), who also took the drug. Time travel in this case lasts only seven minutes. Thank goodness, because the past isn’t necessarily as romanticized as we sometimes think. Steve returns to the howling winds of the Ice Age and introduces fire to Early Man. Then he disappears into the era of the Conquistadors and is almost devoured by an alligator. Back in the present, and seeing the movie Back to the Future on TV, Steve tells the bartender, “the past fucking sucks!” And, surrounded by the panorama of New Orleans at night, he exclaims to Dennis, “the present is a miracle, bro.” These literal trips to earlier times are interspersed with the working days and nights of the two men’s lives. Dennis is constantly fighting with his wife Tara (Katie Aselton) and Steve, single and a bit of a player, tells him ultimately how good he has it. He describes his life – which could be all of ours – as defined by “random events, chance and luck.” And Dennis, reflecting on Steve’s possible last days, suggests, “all that crazy shit before you die, there’s infinite possibilities.” Both Mackie (Steve) and Dornan (Dennis) have built up substantial acting resumes. Mackie has appeared in 8 Mile, Million Dollar Baby and The Hurt Locker, Dornan in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette but likely is best known as Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades trilogy. Here they connect effortlessly in a classic buddy film with supernatural overtures. Some of the best cinematography occurs in the time travel sequences especially in the set of what was presumably the Battle of New Orleans.

In Montreal, alas, a virtual film festival

 

Given that many film festivals had gone virtual I almost jumped when I heard that Montreal’s well-regarded Festival du nouveau cinema (FNC) – 49th edition – was doing a combo virtual and in-person event. So, I reserved three tickets for its mainstay Cinéma Impérial, getting essentially the same right-side aisle seats I normally get in the plush historic downtown building (and where as a kid I went to see How the West Was Won,  The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and  It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World in the then Cinerama theatre). The seat chart provided for plenty of social distancing. Then the axe fell. In late September, due to skyrocketing Covid in La Belle Province, indoor dining and theatres were forced to close. But the FNC swiftly made screenings entirely online and I got coupons. (Montreal in person was nice to visit in the fall anyway.) Back home I watched films online, admittedly not the same “event” as viewing in-person.

The first film: Last and First Men, famed Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s initial feature and an astonishing meditation on the worldly and otherworldly based on 1930s British author William Olaf Stapledon’s novel. A disembodied voice (Tilda Swinton) from two billion years in the future informs that as our world is in peril so too is the highly evolved future of advanced human species, also facing extinction. She tells us that, contrary to popular belief, the future is certainly not a “utopia” and “no such paradise existed through the eons that lie between your age and mine.” Jóhannsson’s classical and synthesizer score matches the surreal abstract landscape, the narrative’s visual counterparts. A film you might buy and watch again and again.  

 

The second film, from Japan, was by another first timer, Isamu Hirabayashi’s - Shell and Joint. Like Last and First Men its subject is the cosmos, life and death, birth and rebirth, and told through vignettes often in black humor. There are philosophical snippets. “Death is probably more boring” says Yoko (Mariko Tsutsui), who likes to contemplate suicide. To which her friend Nitobe (Keisuke Horibe) responds, “I love it when you talk that way.” Or, after a battle of the sexes argument she says, “In cosmic time does that last exchange…register as having existed at all?” Throughout the two hours-plus film there is the motif of crustaceans and insects paralleling human life and death cycles. And more. Guests in a pod hotel are cut off from one another. Animated insects philosophically fear death. “One moment you’re dreaming and then you’re dead,” observes one over a colleague – a cockroach’s - upturned body. And throughout a quirky jazz score by Watanabe Takashi underlines the offbeat touch.

The third film was actually made in 2014 by Guillaume Nicloux, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. A black comedy about a rumored real kidnapping of the famous and iconoclastic author, long a bête noire to the French literary and political establishments for his condemnation of postmodernism, the European Union and Islamism. The joy here is that Houellebecq stars in the film. It’s delicious to watch this supreme intellectual as a morbid sad sack who craves red wine and doesn’t mind the occasional fling with a prostitute. Asked why he looks tired, he replies “the press stresses me out.”  While amusing, I’d wished the film contained more political discussion. We get just a little. “Europe’s true vocation is to make democracy impossible and instead a government of experts,” Houellebecq declares. “I’m against it.”

The FNC is airing online through Oct. 31. And at $10 a pop it’s a treat for anyone who longs for films which tell stories that inevitably break the narrative, character or cinematic mold. www.nouveaucinema.ca

Albert Brooks - everyman's neurotic

 

The Criterion Channel’s decision last week to make a sleight of Albert Brooks movies available was just the ticket for a weekend of hilarity. There aren’t a whole lot of humorous films out there these days in a very sad and unfunny year. I’d never cottoned onto Albert Brooks during his 1980s and 90s heyday – he just seemed too conventional – but grew to admire his work, especially after seeing his 1996 Mother starring Debbie Reynolds. Now I’m in full Brooks adulation mode. Brooks is in the same league of younger 20th Century Jewish comedians like Woody Allen and Richard Dreyfuss – hyper, neurotic, narcissistic and sardonically funny. His films since the Nineties have been few and far between and nowhere as successful though he continues acting and doing voice work. I wonder why - maybe the earlier movies never did great at the box office? In Real Life (1979), Brooks spoofs the reality documentary by filming the story of a contemporary family (Charles Grodin is the dad) as it unintentionally disintegrates under the weight of its newfound notoriety. Brooks as the director is vain and Hollywood-shallow as he defies all around him – staff, producer, the family itself – who maintain the documentary won’t work out. In Modern Romance (1981) Brooks plays Robert Cole, a film editor, with Mary Harvard (Kathryn Harrold) his main squeeze. It opens with them breaking up over dinner because he’s adamant they don’t have enough in common. Then he drives himself crazy wooing her back, spying and stalking just short of criminality, until she acquiesces. But, of course, the relationship doesn’t end there. Lost in America (1985) (photo above), perhaps the best film of the five I watched, is the prototypical road movie but with a twist. Brooks and Julie Haggarty (always worth watching) are a Yuppie couple who are giving up on the rat race and hitting the road to find themselves. Their spiritual guide is the movie Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper 1969). But when Brooks as former ad man David Howard gives a thumbs up to an Easy Rider type biker from the window of his plush RV, the biker gives another kind of finger back. You get the idea. In Defending Your Life (1991) Brooks teams up with Meryl Streep. Both characters have died prematurely and end up in some limbo state called Judgment City where they’re put on trial over their life histories. This is the weakest of the films and too long but the sendups of modern hospitality (albeit in the afterlife) are amusing and Streep as Julia, who takes a romantic interest in Brooks, is incredibly charming and hilarious. Finally, in Mother, Brooks decides to retreat to his childhood home and move in with his mom Beatrice, played by Debbie Reynolds. It seems ridiculous for a semi-successful middle-aged writer to move home and redecorate his old bedroom like in high school. But the real delight is the dynamics between him and mom. Reynolds plays the oh-so-typical every mom - old school, a bit ditzy, and in her mind reasonable in a way their children find absurd. Attempts to bond between them are thwarted as the two are incapable seeing eye to eye. It’s not real conflict, just the frustration of two different generations trying to connect. Finally, a general observation on the films.  The era the movies were made in – yes, I lived through it – doesn’t seem that long ago but I guess it is. And they look aged – from square shaped tinny cars to clunky phones, shoulder pads and feathery hair, to DOS computers. And it’s startling to see that at one time people dressed-up.