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Woody Allen

Review: Hannah and Her Sisters

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Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

review | Hannah and Her Sisters

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Falling short of the top tier of Woody Allen’s work, Hannah still offers up an inviting slice of New York life in the mid ’80s

by Michael Gaughn
updated May 6, 2023

Many consider Hannah and Her Sisters one of Woody Allen’s best films. Some call it his best. I find it incredibly uneven. It does have some strong sequences, scenes, and moments that represent tremendous growth in Allen’s skill as a filmmaker, but it also has some off-key and sometimes embarrassingly lame moments that keep it from achieving a satisfying balance. And it’s about 20 minutes too long.

Allen hit his stride as an actor’s director here. He was able to draw effective performances out of a large and diverse cast, ranging from the Studio Era stylings of Maureen O’Sullivan and Lloyd Nolan to the Bergmanesque solemnity of Max Von Sydow to the looser, more indie vibe of Dianne Wiest and Barbara Hershey—both of whom are exceptional, especially Hershey. Even Carrie Fisher is something other than grating for a change. The one person who can’t seem to find the right groove is Michael Caine, who has his good moments but who seems determined—like Kenneth Branagh (Celebrity) and Jesse Eisenberg (Café Society)—to do some kind of Woody impression. It doesn’t work.

And then there are Allen’s cringe-worthy efforts to begin dismantling his own persona. I understand that he didn’t want the nuanced version of the Woody character to detract from the more dramatic plot lines and hoped to use his character’s misadventures here—mainly his scramble to find a religion he can buy into—as comic relief. But while occasional lines land, his scenes just aren’t funny. Allen always had a pitch-perfect ear for comedy, so he had to have known the bits set at the ersatz SNL were painfully weak. I remain baffled by what he was going for, and how he could have so readily abandoned a painstakingly molded character that had not only served him well but had become an unparalleled vehicle for expressing, mocking, and dissecting the age.

As for Hershey, films like Boxcar Bertha and The Stunt Man had given her a reputation as something of an indie-film bimbo, so it was heartening to see her get the chance to play a fully fledged, non-objectified character and run with it. Ultimately, Hannah doesn’t revolve around Mia Farrow or Caine or Allen or Wiest but Hershey, who stands firmly at its emotional core and brings it a substance and energy it might have been lacking if the role had gone to someone else. It’s a great loss that she never again got to play a part this good.

People were pleased but not necessarily surprised when Allen was able to create characters who evoked the world around him in films like Annie Hall and Manhattan. But they were shocked to find he could craft well-rounded and not-so-predictable characters like Hershey’s—or 27 years later, Cate Blanchett’s Jasmine.

Like a lot of people, I had assumed the ugliest decade in American culture was the ‘70s, so it was a jolt to be reminded that the ‘80s were actually worse. Most of the characters here look like they got their clothes at the Salvation Army, and there’s just a kind of elevated sloppiness to the whole world that’s, in retrospect, kind of repugnant. Of course, some of this was unique to New York, which was just emerging from its nadir in the mid ‘70s and making the grunginess of midst-of-being-flipped neighborhoods like SoHo chic in an effort to inflate real-estate values. But the scene near the end where Allen comes across Wiest in a Tower Records, with its salmon and teal cutouts, glandular lettering, and Barry Gibb posters, reminded me we all would have been better off if the ‘80s had never happened.

Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma deserves praise for taking the streets, walls, and doorways of the older, decaying New York, the affluent shabbiness of lofts and sprawling Upper West Side apartments, and the carefully cultivated disregard for personal appearance and making it all look beautiful. I doubt any other film has better evoked November in New York. This Blu-ray-quality HD download is an acceptable viewing experience, but Di Palma’s shooting style is so subtle that there are moments here that look flat when they should have an understated but distinctive pop.

Di Palma is also important because he helped dispel the myth that a lot of Allen’s skill as a director came from using Gordon Willis as a crutch. By this point, Allen had developed a basal aesthetic and technique he was able to successfully translate from film to film regardless of who was doing the shooting, giving lensers like Di Palma, Sven Nykvist, and Javier Aguirresarobe the latitude to enhance his material without ever having to prop it up.

This is the film where Allen began to be accused of creating what was called yuppie porn—a not unfair swipe since Hannah did help lay the groundwork for more unfortunate later works like Match Point. But the greater sin on display here could be called “assimilation porn,” which he paid a disproportionately high price for in the anti-Semitic backlash to his custody trial, when the seemingly hip but inherently conservative New York and Hollywood elites he showcased so well turned on him so viciously.

While it’s not possible to put Hannah and Her Sisters is the highest tier of Allen’s work, that’s not to say it can’t be enjoyable. Most of the characters are well crafted, most of the performances click, most of the presentation is satisfying, and Allen almost perfectly captured New York at that moment in time. Only his uncertainty about what to do with his own persona keeps it from coming together into a more cohesive whole.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Thie Blu-ray-quality HD download is an acceptable viewing experience but Carlo Di Palma’s shooting style is so subtle that there are moments that look flat when they should have an understated but distinctive pop

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Review: Play It Again, Sam

Play It Again, Sam (1972)

review | Play It Again, Sam

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This film version of Woody Allen’s Broadway play showed he had a range behind his cartoony early films, laying the groundwork for his more sophisticated later work

by Michael Gaughn
November 16, 2022

This is a decidedly minor movie made in the somewhat frivolous style director Herbert Ross (The Goodbye Girl, Footloose) was known for, and all involved had to have known they were devoting their energies to what was basically a throwaway. But Play It Again, Sam is still well worth watching 50 years on, partly because the lines still deliver but mainly because it was the incubator or springboard (pick your metaphor) for everything that would be great about Woody Allen’s later work.

In 1972, Allen was in the middle of making the “early, funny” films that would build his initial movie audience. Take the Money and Run and Bananas preceded Sam; Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Sleeper, and Love and Death would follow. The problem is, those first directorial efforts are almost unwatchable today—for a couple of reasons. Allen was still an apprentice, a little obviously learning on the job and with no real ability with actors. Also, conceptually, the films tended to be extensions of his S.J. Perelman-inspired essays for The New Yorker, and—especially when looked back on now—was the kind of material that played better on the page than on the screen. But if he hadn’t paid his dues, he would have never matured into a master filmmaker.

Allen originally wrote Play It Again, Sam as a play, which he performed on Broadway for more than a year with Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts. In it lie the seeds for everything that would blossom in mid-period masterworks like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories, and would define the best of his later films. He already had vast experience as a TV sketch writer but Sam forced him to focus on creating believable characters who could sustain scenes and ultimately a play. Probably more importantly, it showed he had an uncanny ear for dialogue that feels convincingly natural yet is full of an appropriately theatrical energy, verve, and wit. Allen tends to downplay his abilities, but this alone shows his genius—a talent that’s never been adequately acknowledged because he makes it look so effortless and is done so well that the technique itself is almost invisible. 

I suspect Allen could have never arrived at the breakthrough of Annie Hall if he’d only made movies and never done a play. The need to make sure Sam would land with a live audience—a live Broadway audience—meant everything had to be perfectly honed by opening night since he wouldn’t have the luxury of fixing anything in post. (Most of his early films essentially had to be saved in the editing.) Nothing could be too glib or jokey, and the whole couldn’t play as a disjointed series of big laughs. Just as he learned how to be a filmmaker on the job and in public, the same with his education as playwright and stage actor. The theater forced him to finetune his writing and performance to a degree he’d never had to do with film.

More importantly, it showed him he didn’t need to rely on silly non sequiturs to entertain an audience, that there were people eager to watch other people sit around a New York apartment hashing out their neuroses—as long as there were a few fantasy sequences tossed in. Which is the formula for the best Allen films in a nutshell. No other filmmaker has ever made it more inherently interesting to just listen to people talk to each other for 90 minutes at a pop. 

It’s hard not to watch Play It Again, Sam and wish the Allen of five years later had directed it instead of Ross—but that would have been pointless because in Annie Hall, Allen took what was best about Sam to a far higher level. Fearing the movie version would feel stagebound, Ross made the mistake many directors do of building out the action way too much. And why the hell did they set it in San Francisco when everything about the characters and dialogue screams New York—especially the NYC references that are oddly retained from the play? The ‘70s were the absolute nadir of the film score, and here you have to suffer through an execrable effort by Billy Goldenberg.

But it’s not too hard to look around all that while watching the film and imagine it as it must have played on the stage and how it would have gone if Allen had made the movie instead of Ross. The scenes from the play, when they’re not arbitrarily chopped up for the film, still work beautifully, and this is the first movie where Allen isn’t just trying to be a funny character but a credible urbanite who’s both a victim of and wry commentator on his circumstances.

The  HD presentation on Amazon Prime is pretty faithful to the film’s look, which Owen Roizman (The French Connection, The Exorcist, Network) shot in that archetypal early-‘70s style he pretty much defined. But it seems flatter than it should—even for a style that was defined by its limited color palette. As A Clockwork Orange showed, it’s especially important to keep transfers of ’70s movies faithful to what was originally filmed so they don’t look drearier than they already are. 

One of the pleasures of the movie over the stage version of Play It Again, Sam is its famous—and, for some people, notorious—opening with footage from the final scene of Casablanca. The footage they cut into Sam wasn’t in great shape but it feels a lot more like watching that movie than the recent digitized-to-death 4K HDR release.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The HD presentation on Prime is pretty faithful to the film’s look but seems flatter than it should—even for an early ’70s movie with a limited color palette

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Review: Mighty Aphrodite

Mighty Aphrodite (1995)

review | Mighty Aphrodite

Woody Allen’s last completely solid film until Vicky Cristina Barcelona looks surprisingly good on Amazon Prime

by Michael Gaughn
October 23, 2022

I don’t have a tremendous lot to say about Mighty Aphrodite because, although it’s a solid enough film with some genuinely funny moments and clever enough twists and decent enough acting, especially from Mira Sorvino, it feels lighter than it should be. That seems to have been deliberate on Woody Allen’s part, and I think he went there partly because he didn’t want the bluer material to hit too hard and partly because he didn’t want the Greek tragedy conventions to get too ponderous, but it just seems like the movie should have a little more meat on its bones. 

The big irony is that, coming from any other filmmaker, Aphrodite would have been something of a miracle, since it’s virtually impossible to find movies that rely on wit instead of flat-out jokes and on subtle character interaction instead of a gratuitous succession of puerile clichés. But from Allen, you wish—as with films like Sweet and Lowdown and Melinda and Melinda—that he’d tried a little harder. You can’t really fault the execution, but the base material would have been well served by a little more rumination and revision.

There’s something genuinely sad about Sorvino’s character, and even though Sorvino is terrific at playing her both hardened and naive would-be porn star for laughs, she manages to work in some wistful and defiant notes that cry out for more support from the script. I’m not saying that sensed absence really hurts the film—it holds up well and is enjoyable enough—but it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

The one false note is Helena Bonham Carter as Allen’s wife. She brings her trademark high-strung brooding mannerisms to the role, and little else. You easily believe that she’d aspire to open a gallery in Tribeca, but it’s just not believable that she’d be married to Allen. That’s partly his fault—his persona has rarely been convincing when his character is in something other than show business, and while you can imagine him having a brief relationship with someone like Carter, it’s impossible to buy into the idea they’d have a long, let alone happy, marriage.

The presentation of Mighty Aphrodite on Amazon Prime is surprisingly good—especially given how compromised Bullets Over Broadway, from the previous year, looks on the same service. Given that both films apparently came from the same distribution chain, you have to wonder what’s up. Carlo DiPalma’s cinematography is subtle, especially for a comedy, but always appropriate and effective, and sometimes striking. Skin tones look natural and interiors look realistic, if a tad muted, and the whole of it is a crisp and clean and accurate enough transfer.

If you feel a movie review isn’t an appropriate place to comment on the attempts to savage Allen and obliterate his works, stop reading here. But it’s impossible to watch Aphrodite now and not be reminded that Sorvino was one of the people who turned on Allen based on hearsay and a kind of herd instinct. This film was both the beginning and pinnacle of her career—she won an Oscar for her role, then disappeared into the usual show-biz netherworld of endless dead-ends. I realize this is considered passé at a time when people don and shed professions on a dime (something I’ll refrain from commenting on for now), but there is something—a lot, actually—to be said for dedication to your craft, a focus that ought to preclude indulging in public denunciations based on thin innuendo. But if it wasn’t for that kind of shameless blaming—and the public’s endless hunger for more—there wouldn’t be any social media.  

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The presentation on Amazon Prime is surprisingly good, especially given how compromised Bullets Over Broadway looks on the same service. Skin tones look natural and interiors realistic, if a tad muted, and the whole of it is a crisp and clean and accurate enough transfer.

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Review: Bullets Over Broadway

Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

review | Bullets Over Broadway

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One of Woody Allen’s best, this comedy about the absurdity of creating was also one of his last completely satisfying films

by Michael Gaughn
October 17, 2022

Bullets Over Broadway comes from the end of Woody Allen’s last consistently strong period as a filmmaker. After that, and Mighty Aphrodite in 1995, he would wander in the woods for the next three decades, managing to come up with something truly worthy only about once every 10 years. A lot has fed into that protracted “lost” period (some of which I’ll speculate on below) but the sad truth is that, somewhere around 1996, Allen lost touch with the elements essential to sustaining his work. 

Bullets shows him radically reinventing himself as a filmmaker, a process he’d begun with Husbands and Wives two years earlier but didn’t fully realize until this film. He succeeds mightily, forging a vigorous and responsive and seemingly resilient style that consistently heightens the material. Why he wasn’t able to carry forward and build on what he’d wrought and why it instead led to embarrassing messes like Everyone Says I Love You just two years on remains one of the great mysteries. Allen must have kept the formula in a jar somewhere, though, since he was able to bring it to bear again, in full force, almost 15 years later for Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

In Bullets, he took a looser, higher-stakes approach to his fondness for long-take master shots and semi-improvisational dialogue and applied it to larger, more diverse ensembles in a way that essentially drove the whole work. It’s a nervy form of filmmaking, one that could have easily unraveled if he hadn’t had sufficient confidence in his abilities. It also could have easily become mannered, but applied to the world of Broadway theater, and to the crafting of a play in particular, it feels like a natural extension of the fictional environment.

But there are frustrations. Allen, with his career-long belief that the best way to keep material fresh is to avoid working it too hard, rarely lets his scripts steep enough, and there are moments here that feel embryonic rather than fully fledged and gags that just feel like gags instead of arising naturally from the situations. 

It also takes a few minutes for Bullets to get up on its feet, partly because of its unusual visual style, which ultimately yields big dividends but does take some getting used to, but also because Dianne Wiest’s first scene gives the impression she’s going to lean a little too hard on Norma Desmond throughout. Some more screen time needs to pass before it becomes apparent there’s a character there and not just a lot of derivative posturing.

The bigger problem is the inadequate John Cusack in the lead. He doesn’t have the range to convincingly play a self-important struggling playwright, and his failed attempts to rise to the challenge create something of a void at the center of the film. Allen has always relied on casting the flavor of the month as a way of ensuring some box office for his movies—something he slyly comments on in Bullets through the Cusack character’s difficulties with casting his play—but it doesn’t do him any favors here. 

Fortunately, the combined efforts of Wiest; a surprisingly strong Jennifer Tilly; Chazz Palminteri, in a nicely modulated performance; the rock-solid Jack Warden; the always enjoyable Jim Broadbent (in an underwritten role); and even Tracy Ullman, during the moments when she’s able to rise above her trademark schtick, more than compensate for the presence of the seemingly lost Cusack. 

Thanks to Palminteri, Bullets includes one of the best moments in all of Allen’s work as he and Cusack sit at the counter in a pool hall talking about writing. It’s a seemingly simple scene but the way Palminteri begins to open up, convincingly showing his character is something more than a stereotypical goon, the whole accompanied by the tapping of cues and crack of billiard balls, becomes the almost imperceptible pivot for the whole film. (Allen would largely recapture this 22 years on in a couple of the key exchanges between Jesse Eisenberg and the otherwise unexceptional Blake Lively in Café Society.)

Of all the older movies I’ve looked at recently, Bullets Over Broadway most cries out for a better presentation. Not that it’s unwatchable in HD on Prime but the saturated, constantly bordering on soft, heavy on grain images are ill served by this jittery transfer. Some scenes, like one between Warden and Cusack in a steam bath and the ones in the mob boss’s apartment, with its vast stretches of off-white walls, are full of distracting noise. Luckily, the cinematography is strong enough to punch its way through how it’s presented here, offering a tantalizing glimpse of how Bullets would likely look if it were treated to a straight 4K transfer. 

This is such a good film—one of Allen’s best, although not quite at the level of Annie Hall, Manhattan, or Stardust Memories or the much later Blue Jasmine—that it’s sad Allen wasn’t able to continue to fruitfully mine the vein he’d struck here. You just need to compare Bullets to his effort to cover the same thematic ground in 2005’s Match Point to realize how badly he’s been flailing in his late period. 

There are many possible explanations for those struggles, none of them completely satisfying, but I would point to two big factors. The more simplistic one is that Allen always needed an onscreen anima to define his work against—Diane Keaton up to 1980 and the more problematic—but no less fruitful because of that—Mia Farrow from ‘80 to ‘92. He tried to fill that void for a few years with Scarlett Johansson, but that only resulted in one great film, Vicky Cristina. That Allen, for obvious reasons, was far more distant from Johansson than he was from either Keaton or Farrow, and that she has no discernible comedic chops, made her a comparatively meager source of inspiration.

The more substantial explanation is likely that not just the movies but the culture had changed so drastically that it no longer provided fertile ground for sustaining Allen’s form of romantic fantasy. As I mentioned when reviewing 12 Monkeys, it was around 1995 that films became colder, nastier, and more cerebral, in the detached, game-playing sense. They suddenly stopped being about lived experience and, as the children of the Regan era began calling the shots, became movies about movies instead, divorced from realistic cause and effect, only tenuously tethered to reality. While Allen’s films have always been about fantasy and often about people yearning for lives more like what they see up on the screen, they need that credible anchoring in the messiness of day-to-day urban life, that more emotion-based grounding, to have any resonance at all. Come the mid ‘90s, all of that disappeared from the culture, likely forever, and Allen’s efforts since to build movies on memories of a more substantial world have, not surprisingly, almost inevitably failed. 

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Bullets is watchable in HD on Prime but the saturated, constantly bordering on soft, heavy on grain images are ill served by this jittery transfer

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Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

review | Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Diving into late-period Woody Allen is always a gamble but this lively Johansson/Bardem/Cruz vehicle remains a pretty sure bet

by Michael Gaughn
September 26, 2022

It’s not exactly news that the quality of Woody Allen’s work became incredibly uneven once he emerged from his succession of mid-period classics like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories. For every Purple Rose of Cairo or Zelig there was a Shadows and Fog; for every Husbands and Wives, an Alice. And it only got more erratic as time went on, having to slog through films like Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, and Whatever Works to be able to pluck a Blue Jasmine from the heap. 

Not having seen Vicky Cristina Barcelona in a while and not sure what my impression was of it at the time, I was surprised by how strong it is—much more so than expected. More uneven than it needs to be, it’s still consistently engaging. It’s probably Allen’s loosest, most fluid and energetic film. And it still serves as viewer bait for Scarlett Johansson fans, dating from the era when she was allowed to do legitimate roles, before she succumbed to just being a prepackaged marketing commodity. 

VCB is Allen’s second-best late-period work after Blue Jasmine. (This will seem incredible to some but I’d put Café Society at No. 3.) Allen was so confident in his skill as a filmmaker by this point that he could just resonate with his material, knowing he’d find some deft and distinctive way to express it. Even at the early peak of his powers he was utterly incapable of making a film like this one, which makes his mid-period triumphs feel constipated by comparison. (To be fair, though, films like Vicky Cristina and Blue Jasmine just don’t have the repeat appeal of those earlier efforts.)

Allen takes a novelistic—or at least short-storyish—approach to the film—something he’s also done in movies like Manhattan and Café Society. But with Vicky Cristina he was so sure of himself that he could be far more improvisational without fear it would unravel in the editing, taking the literary and playing it off the cinematic and somehow getting them to coexist without having it feel like a forced marriage. 

The dabs and strokes and feints of the opening, where he sets the action in motion by making a series of suggestions—snatches of dialogue, telling images, evocative sounds, avoiding traditional linearity because he knows films always move forward so a story will arise no matter what—is bravura but completely on point and without being showy. As the film proceeds and Allen further plays around with these ideas, it’s as if the cinematic knows the literary is just there to lay the foundation for moments that are purely about an image, a movement, a sound, a dissolve, a cut, sometimes highlighting just one element, sometimes mixing and matching the emphases. The point, I suspect, is to keep any one character from being dominant and instead keep the focus on the shifting relationships between the characters and on the tentativeness of fleeting emotions. 

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is what Sweet and Lowdown should have been but Allen hadn’t yet broken far enough free of his mid-period technique to pull something like that off. It’s a serious mistake—one often committed—to try to attribute what’s best about Allen’s work to his cinematographer of the moment—here, Javier Aguirresarobe, whose images are undeniably both striking and restrained without indulging in romantic clichés—in other words, apt. Instead of taking the obvious approach, VCB makes place—the location, the geographic-cum-cultural-cum-psychological locus—the spring of the romance, and the mise en scène and montage are just extensions—expressions—of it. No further emphasis is needed. 

But this all arose from the efforts of both Allen and Aguirresarobe, not because Allen gave his DP free rein. Yes, he’s worked with masters like Willis, DiPalma, Nykvist, and (unfortunately) Storaro, but you’d have to be blind not to see that, no matter how strong the cinematographer’s style or big his personality, Allen has always been able to put it in the service of his material and that there’s a consistent look and feel to his movies no matter who’s manning the camera.

The material here is so fertile that it’s not seriously hampered by the mixed bag of the acting. Strongest is Javier Bardem. I’ve never been a fan, but Allen gives him a lot of room to run with his character, and Bardem takes advantage of every inch of it. Rebecca Hall’s mannered kvetching, and resemblance to a Modigliani, can get annoying, especially early on, but isn’t a dealbreaker and actually helps bolster the film’s payoff. Penelope Cruz comes across as a tad overwrought, sometimes hitting the mark, often flailing to define her character. Johansson is more a presence than an actor, of course, a walking encyclopedia of knowing looks who knows how to smolder her way through a scene but rarely helps to elevate the ensemble. 

But, again, VCB is less about individuals than the treacherously unstable ground of relationships, territory Allen captures incisively, and with surprisingly little sentiment. He doesn’t get enough credit for being the first American filmmaker to figure out how to show sex on screen in a natural, convincing, non-gratuitous way. His renderings of carnal encounters are so effortless we don’t realize how brilliant they are, even with more than a century of awkward, overweening, giggly, grotesque counterexamples to draw on.

Because of the whole evanescence of emotion thing, this film really didn’t need a traditional plot, and things get messy and awkward whenever one decides to rear its head. Needing something resembling an ending, Allen introduces some small-arms fire into the proceedings—but he’s always sucked at gunplay. The shotgun dispatching of Johansson in Match Point is one of the most inept, implausible, and unconvincing murders in all of cinema. Here, Cruz firing off rounds in the general direction of Bardem and Hall is a huge false note, a contrivance that sticks out as egregiously as it does because so much of what precedes it is so well done. Somehow, this misstep doesn’t damage the overall impact of the film, partly because Allen redeems himself a few moments later with a lingering silent closeup of Hall who—again, subtly—looks convincingly like a changed person.

I can’t abide lazy, unimaginative reviewers who write the same review over and over, just plugging in some new nouns each time (without varying the adjectives) as if every movie is just like every other and reviewing them is a robotic form of Mad Libs. That said, there’s not a lot new to say about Amazon’s presentation of relatively recent films, which tends to range from acceptable to occasionally extraordinary. This one falls somewhere in the middle, not harming Aguirresarobe’s work but not fully honoring it either. That will take a 4K transfer—but because this is an Allen film and there’s no justice in this world, I’m not holding my breath. 

The warmth of almost every frame is almost there. The subtly muted tones—a look digital has yet to achieve—are pleasing but not as beguiling as they should be. On the other hand, the soft-focus tracking shot of massive sparklers going off in front of a church—the kind of thing streaming consistently bungled just a couple of years ago—is surprisingly solid and clean. 

The phrase “a Woody Allen movie for people who don’t like Woody Allen movies” has always made me cringe—for a lot of reasons, but mainly because the two films most often mentioned in association with it—Midnight in Paris and Match Point—are among his worst. I guess it could be applied fruitfully, though, to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which definitely stands on its own. But to not have the context of the best of the rest of Allen’s body of work and to not know how it both syncs up with and veers away from all that is to be deprived of one of the richest parts of the experience. 

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Not quite capturing the film’s overall warmth or subtly muted tones, Amazon’s presentation doesn’t harm Javier Aguirresarobe’s work but doesn’t fully honor it either

SOUND | It’s a Woody Allen movie, for chrissakes. You can clearly hear people talking and the music cues sound fine—in stereo.

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Review: Annie Hall

Annie Hall (1977)

review | Annie Hall

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Woody Allen’s first truly great film is less a romantic comedy than an incisive and beguiling cultural document of New York in the mid ’70s 

by Michael Gaughn
January 5, 2021

It’s impossible to talk about a Woody Allen movie without having to first weigh in on the ongoing efforts to vilify Allen and obliterate all traces of his career. He’s been spattered with so much bile by Hollywood types like Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page who’ve blindly bought into the Me Too herd mentality that there are fewer and fewer people even willing to approach his films let alone consider them objectively. 

I’m hoping to do an appreciation of his career where I can go into all this a little more. What I would ask for the moment is that you try to ignore the grating cacophony of squeaky wheels and appreciate the works of one of the most accomplished filmmakers of the ‘70s and ‘80s for what they are.

Annie Hall is known as a romantic comedy—a perception that had a lot to do with it snagging a Best Picture Oscar. The thing is, it’s not really a romantic comedy—at least not for me. 

That I’ve never found Diane Keaton to be very attractive, or a very good actress, has helped me develop a different—and I think more accurate—take on the film. Annie Hall is actually a very ambitious, incisive, and candid attempt to capture the essence of a particular culture at a particular moment in time via its embodiment in a particular personality—and that personality is not Keaton.

There had to be a reason why Allen suddenly shifted away from all of those gag-driven early movies that served as his film school and allowed him to build the fan base he was able to ride for the next four decades. And there has to be a reason why he suddenly went from being a good-enough comedy director to a fully fledged and inspired filmmaker.

And I think the answer lies in this exchange from the film:

“The failure of the country to get behind New York City is anti-Semitism.”

“But, Max, the city is terribly run.”

“But we’re not discussing politics or economics. This is foreskin. . . . Don’t you see? The rest of the country looks at New York like we’re Left-Wing Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here.”

New York City had pretty much imploded in the wake of the social upheaval of the ‘60s and was in a wretched state by the mid ‘70s. Very much like the way it’s portrayed in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, it had become a kind of repository for all of the country’s sins. This was probably the city’s darkest period, years before the unfettered avarice of the ‘80s turned Manhattan into a playground for billionaires and Brooklyn into a day-care center for their kids. 

Allen’s identification with the city was so strong that this all had to have sent him reeling. Knowing that it was the prime source of his inspiration—and of his creativity in general—he needed to work out what it meant to be a popular entertainer trying to create within a metropolis that the rest of the country was treating like it had the plague. 

That’s what Annie Hall is really about—Diane Keaton was just his Trojan Horse, a way to open some doors and to make sure the studio got its money back. 

The movie comes very close to being a drama. Just slightly shift the emphasis of almost every one of the scenes and it becomes a sobering look at people desperately trying to define themselves at a time when there were very few reliable guideposts to lean on. Had Allen approached the film that way—although he wasn’t yet that good of a filmmaker—Annie Hall would have been wrenching instead of hilarious.

Consider how Allen treats his own character—which is the same as saying, how he treats himself. This is not a very flattering portrayal—miles away from the narcissism he’s too often accused of. Alvy Singer displays a lot of bluster, and uses his jokes as his armor, but you can tell the guy is hopelessly lost—which Allen expresses through the movie’s loose, improvisational structure, trying on different styles and techniques and attitudes to see what will stick.

But that shouldn’t be mistaken as Allen himself flailing from behind the camera. Just consider the famous scene of him and Keaton on line at The New Yorker, where Allen humiliates the pontificator by dragging a seemingly embalmed Marshall McLuhan into the shot. It’s a nuanced and logistically complex near-3-minute single-take piece of bravura comedy filmmaking that only a self-assured and truly inspired director could have pulled off. And that’s just one example among many.

True, this isn’t the film Allen set out to make, and a lot of Annie Hall did come together in the editing room. But the list of genius directors who’ve confided that the real filmmaking happens in the editing is long. And they’re not wrong. 

Allen started out with a film that was true to his intentions but was all cake and no icing, and he sweetened it just enough to make it palatable for his audience, which was expecting another Sleeper. In the end, he found himself named King of the Romantic Comedy with a couple of Oscars left at his door—an experience he likely wasn’t expecting and that probably scared the bejeezus out of him.

Annie Hall was Allen’s Rhapsody in Blue—a loosely structured, jazz-inflected work that announced that he had ambitions that went beyond being a successful pop performer. And, as with Gershwin, he was never able to do anything quite that fluid and intuitive again, instead trying on different genres defined by others with decidedly mixed results.

But Hall holds up. A surprising number of the jokes and gags still land, his approach to the material and the scenes remains fertile unexplored territory for other filmmakers, and the way he took the careening wreck of New York City and turned it into the most vital and romantic place on Earth is still seductive. The City owes him a statue—but then some group of Yahoos would come along and demand that it be taken down.

Talking about seeing the film in HD is difficult. Gordon Willis’s cinematography is known for being dark and bold, but it’s very subtle, almost documentary-like here. In HD, it feels flatter than it should—not unwatchable, just flat. And then there’s the weird dilemma of having to separate the shots where he deliberately and beautifully exploited grain—like the famous shot of Annie and Alvy standing on a pier at twilight with the East River bridges arrayed behind them—from the ones that are overrun with grain because the elements for the transfer probably weren’t the best.

As for the sound—come on, this is a Woody Allen movie. One of Allen’s greatest strengths as a  filmmaker is the ability to make his material compelling without relying on CGI, flashy editing, explosions, or other gratuitous effects. This is moviemaking stripped down to its essence, and it can be cleansing to luxuriate in a piece of cinema that doesn’t pivot on its ability to mercilessly abuse you.

Forget that this is supposed to be a romantic comedy. Forget about its Oscars. Forget about the well-heeled mob of Hollywood conformists bleating for Allen’s blood. Approach Annie Hall as an adventurous and innovative and unusually honest piece of filmmaking and you’ll get the chance to experience—or re-experience—one of the best American films of the final quarter of the last century, the movie that helped start the wave that brought New York back from the dead, for better or worse.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | This HD presentation feels flatter than it should—not unwatchable, just flat

SOUND | Come on, this is a Woody Allen movie

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Review: Rifkin’s Festival

Rifkin's Festival (2020)

review | Rifkin’s Festival

Buried somewhere deep in the heart of this unholy mess lies a movie actually worth watching

by Michael Gaughn
January 31, 2022

So little of Rifkin’s Festival coheres that you basically have two choices: Turn away or mentally cobble together the bits that add up to the film Woody Allen seemed to be trying to make. Just passively toughing it out as presented really isn’t an option.

Which explains why I almost took a pass on reviewing this. But the more I thought about it, the more I sensed that there was a bit of a rough diamond buried deep in its dungheap that might be worth trying to pluck out, no matter how dirty and unpleasant the task. So here we are.

Allen’s previous film, A Rainy Day in New York, was an even bigger mess that had practically nothing going for it and probably never should have been released. So expectations—mine and of the remaining smidglet of the curious—were really low here. 

The thought of spending 90 minutes with Wally Shawn at the center of a cinematic world induced a sense of dread. And, unfortunately, my expectations there were more than met. The casting of Shawn was misguided, if not disastrous, basically because he never had much of a range to begin with and, now that he’s older, has practically no range at all. His character is so thinly sketched in, and Shawn himself is such a negative screen presence, that he (both the character and the actor) just can’t provide the badly needed glue to bring it all together. A little more effort here, both with the conceptualization and the casting, would have made all the difference.

But Rifkin’s Festival is, once you start groping around in that pile, primarily about someone who exists almost wholly divorced from the real world trying to make whatever tentative connections he can with reality. And, viewed from that angle, Shawn couldn’t be more apt, even iconographic. Allen frequently emphasizes that gulf by framing and editing him so he’s ignored by the other characters. Even though he’s clearly a part of the action, he comes across as a passive spectator and an ineffectually ironic commentator.

And this is where the film begins to get interesting. The stuff with Shawn almost invariably falls flat, while just about everything with female leads Gina Gershon and Elena Anaya is surprisingly strong, even compelling. Rifkin is most engaging when it veers toward drama, when it sheds its irony and allows the characters to interact directly and with intensity. The exchange between Louis Garrel and Gershon on the boardwalk, Shawn and Anaya stumbling upon her artist husband in bed with one of his models, Anaya later putting Shawn at arm’s length while she grapples with what to do with her marriage and her life all have an inherent and authentic power. And if Allen’s point was that those messy interactions and emotions are what bring meaning to existence and Shawn is completely ill-suited to ever engage, then that’s a filmic experience worth having. It’s too bad he didn’t decide to shift his emphasis and proportions accordingly somewhere along the way. 

Gershon, who has never made much of an impression before, is almost obliquely commanding, running much farther than expected with the half-baked material she’s given to work with. Anaya takes some getting used to and is saddled with a character who’s less whole person than convenient plot device, but she somehow makes her seem real over the course of the film.

Garrel is perfectly apt as the smug, pretentious movie director but isn’t as resourceful as the female leads at making something out of the straw man he’s been handed. This was a huge lost opportunity because the comments Allen attempts to make about the current state of Hollywood “art” need to be said—he’s just way too glib, obvious, and scattershot about saying them.

I wish Allen had never crossed paths with Vittorio Storaro, whose too insistent shooting style constantly goes against the grain of what Allen is trying to convey. Even in HD (which is the only way you can watch the film on Google Play), the digital cinematography is too sharp—to the point of being garish and grating. It’s especially out of place in a movie that frequently references classic movies. The various pastiches would have been far more convincing, and beguiling, if they’d been shot on 35mm and presented with a sense of film passing through a gate—but I suspect going that way would have been a budget-buster. 

HD is actually an appropriate vehicle for Rifkin’s Festival. A 4K presentation would probably make it look even more video-like and antiseptic. 

I flat-out hated the original soundtrack, which tries to ape Django and the Hot Club of France—something many, like The Gypsy Hombres, have tried and at which all have failed. Reinhardt’s isn’t a “sound” to be reproduced but an utterly unique extension of his complex soul, the sum of his experiences, insights, and unmimicable technique. Allen would have been far better off patching the score together out of vintage tracks, even if it wouldn’t have felt as consistent.

The music, like the images, is crisply, pretty much faultlessly, presented—which is unfortunate, because they both cry out for an analog patina. 

Thanks to the ongoing New Puritan backlash that continues to plague Allen, it took two years for this film to get released. Only a handful of people will ever see it, and most of those people will wonder why they even bothered. But, even though it never comes together into a complete being, Rifkin’s Festival has more meat on its bones than any of the other walking corpses currently staggering across the blasted entertainment landscape.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Even in HD (the only way you can watch the film on Google Play), the digital cinematography is too sharp—to the point of being garish and grating. 4K would likely make it look even more video-like and antiseptic. 

SOUND | The music, like the images, is crisply, pretty much faultlessly, presented, but both cry out for an analog patina

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Review: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)

review | A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

This would rank as one of Woody Allen’s best films—if he’d just spent some more time figuring out the ending

by Michael Gaughn
February 3, 2021

It’s got maybe the worst title ever and probably the worst ending of any Woody Allen film, but wedged between the opening-title card and that Third Act that got away is one of Allen’s best films, an almost perfectly balanced ensemble piece that’s probably the best evocation ever of midsummer, which is especially amazing when you consider how much Allen hates the country.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy was his first film with Mia Farrow and kicked off the diverse and more subdued but still fecund era that followed the tremendous creative explosion of Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories. Allen shot Sex Comedy simultaneously with Zelig, which he now admits wasn’t such a great idea but led to two amazing miniatures. He and Farrow would then do such standouts as Broadway Danny Rose (one of his best), The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and the superb but troubling Husbands and Wives. After their all too public breakup, Allen would spend the following decades wandering in the woods, producing far more misses than hits, but occasionally conjuring up gems like Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, and Blue Jasmine that, at the end of the day, still give him a higher overall batting average than any other first-rank filmmaker.

What makes Sex Comedy different from almost every other one of his films (and there are a lot of them) is that he apparently decided to start by capturing a certain time of year—the feel of the peak of summer—and then build a movie around it. He and Gordon Willis had already done something similar with Manhattan, where no other film has done a better job of evoking the sense of the Upper East Side at night. You’re not just watching the people stroll the streets—you’re right there with them, which creates an irreplaceable bond with the characters. 

Here, you’re placed in the midst of the country that sits just on the cusp of the city—more specifically, Westchester County, just north of Manhattan—which is conveyed in such a way that it feels like both the city’s complement and dialectical other. This is some of Willis’s best cinematography, which is saying a lot, managing to capture that elusive sense of warm days, abundant nature, and lingering light. There is a reliance on day for night, which creates some unevenness toward the end, but is only really egregious in a shot of Tony Roberts leaving the front of the summer home to go off into the woods.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well Willis’s images came across in Kaleidescape’s Blu-ray-quality HD presentation. The subtle gradations are for the most part there and it’s possible to get lost in the frame while being only occasionally jarred by blown-out bright spots like the full moon. Of course, this film would likely look superb in 4K HDR, which would pull out the abundant detail in the fields, the interiors, and especially the period clothing, but I have no significant nits with the look of the film in its current incarnation. (And, given where this film stands in Allen’s body of work, and his current status in general, it’s not like Sex Comedy and 4K are likely to cross paths any time soon.)

Sex Comedy marks a big step forward in Allen’s evolution as a director, displaying a new maturity with his handling of the cast. Mary Steenburgen, Jose Ferrer, and Farrow all give nuanced, engaging performances that help reinforce the heady atmosphere of the film. Allen is even able to make Julie Haggerty shine within her very limited range. The one false note is Roberts, who was always tolerable when relegated to playing Allen’s sidekick but just isn’t that good of a film actor and whose beats always feel a little forced here. But nothing he does is enough to ever disrupt the ensemble’s seemingly effortless momentum.

Allen shows an increased mastery of film technique as well, with that new-found confidence carrying over into an increasing reliance on lengthy master shots, which reinforce the film’s ensemble nature while also lending it an appropriately pastoral rhythm. The Allen of his earlier movies would have been unable to pull off the extended exchange where Steenburgen confronts his character about lying about Farrow, which is masterfully blocked and performed.

This is just about the last film where Allen allowed his character to be well-rounded and witty, for some reason opting to just spew jokes via a borderline caricature from that point on. I’m not sure why he wandered off down such a self-defeating path—it’s obvious from the documentary Wild Man Blues that he was still capable of ringing resonant changes on the persona he’d so carefully wrought—but Sex Comedy pretty much represents the swan song of the Woody who defined an era.

Now, about that ending: Allen does an unimpeachable job of establishing the atmosphere, then setting the tone, then introducing the characters, and then setting the various interactions in motion, fleshing out the characters along the way. And all of that is so delicious and, yes, charming that it makes it that much more dispiriting when you have to deal with the train wreck of the final act. My surmise—and I’m really winging it here—is that working simultaneously on Zelig prevented him from seeing the flaws in the Sex Comedy script and likely kept him from doing the kind of reshooting that allowed him to elevate many of his other films from pedestrian or confused to extraordinary. 

Had he been able to solve the puzzle he created for himself, Sex Comedy would have easily ranked up with Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah in the mass mind. But anyone who hesitates because of what they’ve heard, or who has heard nothing at all about this film, is missing out in a big way. This is what a great movie feels like when it feels like it doesn’t need to strut its stuff. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is so light and energetic and infectious, it’s like a bracing tonic—the cinematic equivalent of a good saison. It moves and feels like no other film. It’s Allen’s most underrated work—and it’s a much needed infusion of summer light during what is, in many ways, the darkest time of the year.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The Blu-ray-quality HD presentation is really, really good, making it hard to find any serious flaws—not that you couldn’t find problems if you really wanted to hunt for them but nothing ever happens to pull you out of the film, which is all that matters at the end of the day. 

SOUND | It’s not like Woody Allen makes silent movies and audio doesn’t matter—the all-important dialogue can be clearly heard, the mix helps create atmosphere in the scenes, and the music cues carry an appropriate weight. But it’s all in modest service of the material, as it should be.

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Review: Blue Jasmine

Blue Jasmine (2013)

review | Blue Jasmine

Woody Allen’s best late-period work is an almost perfectly balanced drama that still resonates almost ten years on

by Michael Gaughn
February 8, 2021

Fast forward 30 years from the last Woody Allen effort I reviewed, 1982’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, and you arrive at Blue Jasmine, his best late-period work and the film that nabbed Cate Blanchett a Best Actress Oscar. That at first glance it can be difficult to see the common DNA between these two movies shows how much Allen evolved as filmmaker over the decades and helps dispel the jaundiced myth that he is little more than an assemblage of mannerisms treading in a rut.

What isn’t a myth is that Allen has struggled ever since his break with Mia Farrow after 1992’s Husbands and Wives. He earned much praise for Match Point (2005), but that film is ultimately undone by its implausibility, and its success can mainly be attributed to the public’s fascination with the bright, shiny Scarlett Johansson. Midnight in Paris (2011) was celebrated as a return to form, and made Allen a crapload of money, but it’s basically a lazy recitation of his greatest hits that’s ultimately thinner than fast-food coffee. Wonder Wheel (2017) earned Kate Winslett some kudos (but the real standout is Jim Belushi, who’s so good it’s shocking) and the film almost works, if you’re willing to roll with its early acts, but is ultimately a noble failure.

Of the later films, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Vicky Christina Barcelona, the dramatic sections of Melinda and Melinda, and, much more modestly, Cafe Society, join Blue Jasmine as the ones worth a good look. (I’ve been trying to see the Sean Penn vehicle Sweet and Lowdown for years but it flits in and out of circulation so arbitrarily that I’ve never been able to seize the opportunity on the rare occasions when it’s bobbed to the surface.)

Jasmine exists at a higher level than any of his other late-period work, on par with the much earlier Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Broadway Danny Rose, and The Purple Rose of Cairo. But it’s not easy to pin down why everything suddenly clicked here. Unlike his other masterworks, it’s not a comedy, although it does have some humorous touches. The Allen persona is nowhere to be seen, even in surrogate form. And even though he has an incredibly uneven track record with dramas, Allen shows an effortless command here. 

I suspect many would attribute its success to Blanchett, but that shows a fundamental ignorance of how movies work. She didn’t write the script, plan or execute the shots, or labor in the editing room. Without that elaborate support—which is essentially the entire edifice of a film—a performance, no matter how good, isn’t worth bupkis. I think the success of Jasmine, and the reason Allen rose to the occasion, can be actually attributed to class. But I’ll get to that.

Blue Jasmine exhibits a bounty of great acting, and it’s not really possible to appreciate the film without first considering Allen and actors. From the late ’70s on, and even in his subpar efforts, Allen has offered a place where actors can show their abilities without fear of being humiliated, relegated to reciting genre cliches, treated like the director’s marionette, or subjugated to green screen. Because he provided an oasis, a place where an actor’s abilities were treasured and given room to flourish, a tremendous diversity of talent flocked to his projects—that is, until Me Too happened (but we’re not going to go there again). 

(It’s ironic, by the way, that someone with no traditional training turned out to be the best actor’s director of the last half century.)

What’s always intriguing about Allen is that he can get me to appreciate performers I can’t stomach elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to spend a nanosecond with Andrew Dice Clay outside the boundaries of this film, and yet he’s perfectly cast here. Pretty much the same can be said for Louis C.K., who’s insufferable as a comedian and elsewhere only borderline acceptable as an actor. (He does do a strong turn in American Hustle, though.) Here he shines. Ditto for Alec Baldwin, who’s become a caricature of himself over time but rises above his limitations in Jasmine.

Other standouts: Bobby Cannavale (Boardwalk Empire) brings depth and some surprising twists to what could have been a thuggish performance as Sally Hawkins’ boyfriend. And Michael Stuhlbarg, who out and out stole Men in Black 3 as the pixieish multi-dimensional alien Griffin, is far more understated but still strong here.

As for Blanchett: As one of those performers, like Penn and Streep, far better at “acting” than acting, I’ve always found her work rough going—her attempt to play Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator was so cringeworthy I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen—but she is perfectly in sync with Allen’s material and makes a potentially unsympathetic character compelling. And while Blanchett got most of the attention, Hawkins—another actor I could usually take or leave—I think actually bests her here.

The two weak spots in the chain are Peter Sarsgaard, who just doesn’t bring enough heft to his role as the aspiring diplomat, and Alden Ehrenreich as Blanchett’s son, who barely registers as a presence. 

About the whole class thing: Allen has taken a lot of heat over the years, some of it justified, for being overly enamored with Upper East Side society. And a lot of his portrayals are so fawning they take on a peepshow quality for almost every human being on the planet who wasn’t to the manor born. But the 2008 recession caused him to put all that in perspective, and Blue Jasmine is a perceptive, even biting, look at the great class divide that doesn’t have an ax to grind for either side—and thankfully doesn’t fall into the oppressive cliche of saying the members of the lower classes are forever doomed to do themselves in. It’s his ability to pull from his vast experience with both sides of the class equation without peddling an agenda that allows him to go deeper than most mainstream attempts to fathom the issue.

(Let me pause to note that Allen is one of the last filmmakers left from the era before you had to be a member of the top one percent to gain admittance to Hollywood, when lower-bred outsiders were at least tolerated as long as their movies made money, when they could still have a voice.)

Blue Jasmine looks really, really good in Blu-ray-quality HD—which I suspect can attributed to the existence of a DI. I was hard pressed to find any serious flaws—not that you can’t find problems if you really want to hunt for them, but nothing that was happening with the images ever pulled me out of the film, which is all that should matter at the end of the day. My one criticism is the introduction of too many golden tones in post. Yes, I get where they were going with that, but I still suspect that future generations are going to look at the early efforts of digital filmmaking and want to slap us silly for not being able to resist fiddling with the knobs.

And now I once again come to the pointlessness of talking about the audio in a Woody Allen film. It’s not like he’s making silent movies and audio doesn’t matter—few directors rely as heavily on dialogue—and it’s not like the mix doesn’t help create atmosphere in the scenes; and it’s not like music cues don’t have a huge impact in his work. The point is that the audio is in modest service of the material, as it should be—there are no bravura flourishes that would make you exclaim “Nice audio!” So let’s just say that it works, and works well.

You don’t need to know anything about Allen’s other films to appreciate Jasmine, but saying that at this moment in time sounds defensive and weak. Allen has created a tremendous and unparalleled body of work, one that deserves to continue to be appreciated. Few directors are capable of making movies that are as human, and Blue Jasmine, as a study of pride and vulnerability, might be his most human film of all. 

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The Blu-ray-quality HD presentation is really, really good, making it hard to find any serious flaws—not that you couldn’t find problems if you really wanted to hunt for them but nothing ever happens to pull you out of the film, which is all that matters at the end of the day. 

SOUND | It’s not like Woody Allen makes silent movies and audio doesn’t matter—the all-important dialogue can be clearly heard, the mix helps create atmosphere in the scenes, and the music cues carry an appropriate weight. But it’s all in modest service of the material, as it should be.

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Review: Stardust Memories

Stardust Memories (1980)

review | Stardust Memories

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The film that drove the masses away from Woody Allen’s work offers the deepest, most nuanced, portrayal of his persona

by Michael Gaughn
March 7, 2021

Having considered a handful of Woody Allen’s most significant films, we now approach his most problematic work (that is, the most problematic for anyone who’s not a prisoner of the irredeemable present). Allen had been on a roll with audiences after Annie Hall and Manhattan but ran into a massive wall with Stardust Memories, which effectively alienated the broader following he’d created with those two earlier films and left him with the small but blindly devoted fan base that would allow him to keep making movies for the next four decades. As perverse as it sounds, it seems possible—even likely—he deliberately created Memories to offend, in a maybe too successful effort to cull the herd.

I wondered in an earlier review why Allen soon abandoned his nimble, well-rounded, creatively fertile persona to portray a thin caricature of himself in later films. The answer might lie here. Being too honest about himself and his perceptions created a backlash that might have been both personally traumatizing and a threat to his career. With his Zelig-like need to be accepted, Allen might have decided that, rather than continue to mine that tremendously and uniquely fruitful vein, he should play it safe—or at least safer—from now on. 

Some have called Stardust Memories his best film. It’s undeniably a great film—it takes tremendous talent to go this picaresque and be this unvarnished and ambitious and still pull it off—but it just doesn’t hang together as well as the equally audacious Manhattan. And I think the fault might lie in the relationships he chose to portray and his too facile casting of his partners. 

Allen tends to go for the Flavor of the Month with his actors, and while Charlotte Rampling might have photographed well, she just doesn’t have the chops to be believable as his deeply disturbed love interest. Marie-Christine Barrault fares slightly better as his more grounded alternative but, again, there’s just not enough depth there. Jessica Harper almost makes her part work, but she’s not a significant enough screen presence to care about. While Allen was likely just staying true to his actual situation, and famous directors undoubtedly do tend to flit from one stimulating but superficial relationship to another, the film needed a deeper emotional resonance there to balance its incisive but ultimately wearying examination of celebrity.

I don’t want to give the impression I don’t like this film—I do. I just wanted to pinpoint where it sags. Stardust Memories shows a fierce courage—and Allen paid a huge price for going there. Many felt he was too brutal on his fans, but that misses the point. He’s mainly exploring why we manifest the worlds we do and his intense dissatisfaction with his current state, which he was largely responsible for. The suffocating fans were just an inevitable extension of that. 

It’s got the loosest structure of any his non-gag-driven films, with a “meet the director” weekend at a seaside resort supplying the armature for him to hang his diverse impressions on, and he makes it work well. The problem (to the degree it is a problem) is that people assumed it would be fun to be inside Allen’s head for 90 minutes and were thrown to find the experience jarring, even disturbing. It’s as if he took another stab at the deeply subjective, free-associational original premise for Annie Hall (called “Anhedonia”) and this time succeeded in landing all the blows.

And let’s not forget that Stardust Memories is a comedy, and a funny one—his conversation with a bunch of street-wise aliens (“I have an IQ of 1,600 and I still don’t know what you expected from that relationship with Dorrie”) might be the best bit in any of his films—but there’s not a single comic moment than isn’t deliberately troubled by darker currents—which is what makes the film so brilliant but also threw audiences so hard. 

Allen does somewhat balance, or at least temper, his unflinching take on his reality with a deeply bittersweet romanticism, which he sees as a necessary buffer while realizing that retreats into fantasy always come at a price (something he would explore with far more nuance in The Purple Rose of Cairo). That romanticism permeates the film, in how the Allen character treats his relationships, in the Django Reinhardt-inflected jazz soundtrack, and especially in Gordon Willis’s cinematography, which takes the more epic style of Manhattan and gives it a deeper bite.

My comments about how Willis’s images fare in this Blu-ray-quality HD download will sound eerily similar to my comments about his work in Manhattan. Everything looks good, but not first-rate, and Memories really does need the subtlety of all the captured steps of grayscale to help soften the impact of the deliberately harsh material. The movie is perfectly watchable in this form—although intense pools of bright light are so harsh they’re distracting—but it would be not just better but a different experience in 4K HDR.

Stardust Memories remains a challenging film—partly because none of Allen’s other movies have pushed the audience as hard to consider the difficult, but valid, positions he’s putting forth. It’s hard to appreciate the risks he took here—especially when you consider that even he didn’t accurately anticipate the backlash he’d trigger. If you see this film and know exactly how you feel about it at the end, you weren’t really watching.

In hindsight, this was the pivotal moment in Allen’s career. One of the running gags in Memories is his fans’ preference for his “early, funny” films, a sentiment he acknowledges and, through this film, says he’s OK with because he knows that’s all behind him now. Time has since affirmed his judgment, exposing the many weaknesses of those early movies while revealing the many strengths of his mid-period work.

But this was also his first film in years without Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and although her presence can be felt in the Rampling character, his inability to make the romantic relationships interesting enough does weigh the film down. This is pure speculation, but it seems likely Allen would have continued making far more adventurous movies if the public hadn’t turned on him so viciously after Memories. Looking to regroup, he assumed he needed a leading lady to make his work more palatable—which is when a very eager Mia Farrow appeared.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The movie is perfectly watchable in Blu-ray-quality HD—although intense pools of bright light are so harsh they’re distracting—but it would be not just better but a different experience in 4K HDR.

SOUND | You can hear all the dialogue and various vintage jazz cues just fine.

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