Woody Allen's BLUE JASMINE starring Cate Blanchett

As suspected previously, it's partially a riff on Streetcar Named Desire.

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-woody-allens-blue-jasmine

Woody’s told him that he’d “love to do a movie with him and me, a comedy,” the “him” being Louis C.K., who has a smallish role in Blue Jasmine. Woody’s also been “toying with the idea” of putting together another stand-up routine.

:o

Q.
Could you fit a standup tour into your schedule when you’re making a new movie every year?

A.
I was thinking of it. Since I saw [Mort Sahl], I’ve just been toying with the idea. I would love to see if I could. Just getting together an hour of stuff to talk about would be a lot of work.

Q.
I would think you’ve had an experience or two to draw from since your days at N.Y.U.

A.
Yes, yes, I’ve had some things to talk about. Learned nothing.

Woody and Andrew Dice Clay together at last!

that angle is covered here too:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/woody-allen-standup-guy/

Blanchett is supposed to be http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sNq1IjQ_kBo/UKIg4pjS7XI/AAAAAAAACTA/RGhxch3_Co8/s1600/jawdrop+1.gif in this.

does that mean her performance is good or that she's lookin good in this film

No, that's http://www.animateit.net/data/media/august2009/drool.gif

http://i.imgur.com/yGK7FN7.png

"photograph by terry richardson"

Not sure if this David Thomson review means anything (i.e., Allen is one of those people who regularly gets the Dylan/Scorsese treatment, the rush to proclaim every new work his greatest since whatever--I wouldn't think Thomson would be susceptible to that):

http://www.tnr.com/article/113818/blue-jasmine-review-david-thomson

Zacharek and O'Hehir found it mechanical and lazy, and since I found that was the case when ppl praised Match Point and Midnight in Paris, I fear I'll agree.

Thomson wrote one of the best serious takedowns of Allen in a Film Comment from '97 or '98 on the occasion of Deconstructing Harry

And:

Midnight in Paris is an extended trailer—but it is better than Woody has done for a while. It’s that dismal.

I don't remember the FC piece, but Deconstructing Harry was a delight given recent developments. Thomson's critical faculties have never impressed me.

I like deconstructing harry a lot

no he defended DH

so which Woody tendencies was he taking down?

Richard Brody loves it. Calls Cassandra's Dream one of Allen's "very greatest" films. I have more faith in his judgment than in Denby's, especially when Brody expresses his impatience with the eighties films and calls Husbands and Wives a breakthrough.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/07/woody-allens-blue-jasmine.html

This movie was ludicrous. Ridiculous. Pacific Rim is believable.

dish

I mean I'm gonna see this no matter what just for the shots of my street but what am I in for

You have to accept Cate Blanchett playing a loony bird like a Carol Burnett sketch and -- get this -- that a woman her age needs computer lessons.

Louis CK and Dice Clay are in this and you can't tell -- yet another example of this man casting actors and having no clue what to do with them. Beginning to think Sam Shepard was right.

com...pu....ter?

i saw Blanchett in streetcar named desire onstage and despite handfuls of great reviews i thought she was godawful

supposedly this is a similar role so i'm in no rush

carol burnett is pretty much otm

A few thoughts.

Really disliked this, for many of the reasons Alfred goes into and others. It's just plain boring. The Emperor's New Clothes Film of the Year.

i was shocked how good this was - i think really i'm maybe unable to form an objective opinion, because on so many levels it was surprising just for expressly not conforming to the ghettoised late Allen style i didn't think he could shake. it's compositionally beautiful - like he should never work with another cinematographer, afaic, it's a sorta blueberry nights-esque slide-film-shot lingering montage of patterned fabric & sunlight - & the performances are (most-all) terrific throughout, w/none of the actors seeming hemmed into kind of generic convoluted Allen-speak. i haven't read alfred's review, yet, but i didn't think not knowing what to do with the actors was an issue; baldwin showed the limits of a range i didn't know he was confined by - like, this could have been a really interesting dramatic turn for him - but seeing others in new contexts (incl. louis, fwi-fanboyishly-w, who i thought was magnetic & charming), hawkins, dice clay, &c, was really nice. the guy from a single man is so great, too.

i don't love this film, because it's a twisty & not really in any way important or, to be even more critical, worthwhile film, but at the same time i think it's very strong & a pretty direct contrast from what he's been flailing around in on autopilot for the last five years.

Alfred, I'd like to know what you think of Whatever Works, for some reasons it is the last Allen I enjoyed. Actually, it is the only film post C&M that I think I can say is solid. Also, yes, I was born the same year Stardust Memories was released.

Never saw it!

This will likely land Blanchett an Oscar nod but, again, it's for playing a crazy woman.

The backbone of the film industry is crazy women.

Strangely, Whatever Works is the Allen film this new one most reminded me of, though not for any good reasons. More to do with contemporary people mouthing words and expressing thoughts that more properly belong to people of their parents' generation. At least Whatever Works has the excuse of being shot from a script that dates back to the 1960s, iirc.

"Whatever works" is his mantra these days.

this was abhorrent, baffled at the critical love more than for any other recent Woody

right??

I was already baffled by the love Midnight in Paris got. I'm thinking of skipping this one like I skipped the Rome one.

I wasn't nuts about Paris either but I at least got why people were into it, I guess. this was a slog with a pretty unbearable lead performance.

(credit where credit's due, andrew dice clay was surprisingly good.)

Wow. This wasn't great, but the negative hyperbole itt is classic ilx contrarianism.

the negative hyperbole itt is more in line with woody allen diehards than ilx contrarianism.

I dunno, I'm a fairly big diehard. Maybe I grade the guy on a curve or something, but I enjoyed this much more than his last 5 or 6 movies (for whatever that's worth).

I thought this was pretty bad. I liked the basic structure of the film and I admired some of the performances (especially Sally Hawkins), but the writing in general felt like a first draft. I didn't get the sense that Woody Allen has ever been to the San Francisco. I didn't like Midnight in Paris either but at least that one had a little bit of magic to it.

yeah hawkins was good. diceman was really good! wanted to like this, wanted to like CaBla, but she & cannavale just cant make some terribly conceived characters work

Dice did a good job with what he was given, but I'd like to see him in a better role.

please don't try to make CaBla happen

TriBeCaBla

CaBla's already happening. you cant stop it, Hu2 (pronounced like hutu)

AnDicCla

I didn't get the sense that Woody Allen has ever been to the San Francisco

yeah he missed all the best clam joints for sure

"Yo! Youz guys wanna go get sum clams?!" San Franciscan, 2013

this was such a stupid movie

Film critics inspired by the insufferably conspicuous prose of - wait for it - Zadie Smith: D or D?

Alfred review's OTM.

i didn't think this was terrible. i thought jasmine's arc was compelling, if in a formulaic nu-woody allen way, ie it turns out that she was never that far off in her own private dream world after all, and the main lie she tells herself is that she is not dealing with or facing reality. it's the kind of story issac from manhattan would have written. blanchett's acting was compelling as well, i thought, and seemed way more sophisticated/knowing than the film itself. the working class caricatures in this movie, however, were pretty egregious and unfunny, and in general the way this film dealt with the cultural barriers created by wealth seemed really hackneyed and inauthentic.

i am easy though and was ready to like this movie during the part where jasmine assumes her two urchin nephews would be familiar with the song Blue Moon.

Do you mean "until the part..."?

no i thought that was funny

I love how the DP managed to make you forget about the Bay Area, while filming the Bay Area. That was impressive.

surprising! 5/5 from The Graun http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/19/blue-jasmine-review

i liked it

and what I liked about it is that it indirectly addresses a question I often have when witnessing mentally ill homeless people: where are their families? how do they end up utterly alone?

Oh is that where homeless people come from...

There's an unspoken rule that those who buy Louis Vuitton bags will end up homeless and talking to themselves iirc

Neither, don't be ridiculous. I mean within the context of this story, it explains to you why this person would wind up in a situation where she has no family support.

i liked this, it reminded me a little of 'after leaving mr. mackenzie' by jean rhys.

the working class caricatures in this movie, however, were pretty egregious and unfunny, and in general the way this film dealt with the cultural barriers created by wealth seemed really hackneyed and inauthentic.

damn i actually thought the juxtaposition of not just explicit class signifiers but mannerisms, language, poise was on point. ginger & chilliesp, i guess the credit really goes to the actors but compared to, like, small time crooks, where they just seem dumb for the sake of making dumb jokes, i thought it really nailed it, lots of empathy to go around. missed his chance at making it more ows by characteristically underwriting all the alec baldwin finance stuff but whatever

You have to accept Cate Blanchett playing a loony bird like a Carol Burnett sketch and -- get this -- that a woman her age needs computer lessons.

i thought the joke was that the whole premise of her taking the lessons to take an online course was so convoluted & absurd... but upon further reflection, woody allen prob has nfi how to use a computer

Loved this, I tried not to let all the ‘his best picture since x’ talk get my hopes up, because people always say that about his movies, but I thought this was genuinely good, not just ‘good for a 2013 Woody Allen film’ good.

I thought there were things that have felt kind of awkward in his recent films that really worked here, like this shakiness to the tone, that it’s in this uncomfortable place between being comedic and horrifying.

It's good to get some contrarian opinions here. So you didn't object to how misconceived Blanchett's character was?

I like the way everyone is talking over each other, talking across purposes- like Jasmine’s conversation with people that are really just monologues… but even in the scene when she meets the state department guy, when they’re talking to each other it’s like they’re both delivering monologues about their own life, but not really connecting except in the sense that they can use each other as a prop in their own fantasies, I thought that was conveyed well, the first thing he says to her is something like ‘you don’t want to be in either?’ and he says she was like a wish come true or that it was written in the stars or something, they recognise this quality in each other that they both want to live in a fantasy and are willing to block out unpleasant truths that get in the way? So when he chews her out after he finds out she’s being lying about her past it seems hypocritical, he was just as willing to engage in this fantasy.

The scene where she confronts Baldwin after she finds out about his affairs is kind of like this as well, the sense that they're talking past each other, talking about what this will mean for their own lives rather than their relationship which is just like this void.

misconceived? I think of Woody Allen's characters tend to feel sort of stagey and unnatural but I thought it worked well here.

‘you don’t want to be in here either?’

I remember reading something somewhere arguing that he stopped being able to write compelling female characters after the Mia Farrow split, and pointing out that female characters in the post '93 films tend to be either 2d castrating bitches, prostitutes or crazy.

Why is this so much better that much of his recent work? Is it just that he’s found a subject that’s compelling to him, like semi-autobiographical in terms of being about someone who’s had this very public fall from grace and is estranged from their son?
Is it tacky to read a film in terms of the personal life of its director?
I was thinking of Blanchett’s character as the Woody analogue in this, but the scene where she meets her stepson again and he tells her he hates her more than his father for being the one who exposed everything, could you see it as a fantasy where she stands in for Farrow, and their child rejects her, with Woody as the departed dead father, neatly deceased rather than still existing as this awkward reminder? I don’t know, maybe this is a tacky way to talk about a film.
Is this a common terror of people who go from a working class background to the ranks of the super wealthy, that it could all get taken away from you and you wake up back in some pokey flat with your loud, uncouth family? That feeling of it all being not quite real?

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/21/philip-chism-accused-raping-murdering-danvers-high-teacher-colleen-ritzer/5bcPieUo0n6R3fyYqRTxWN/story.html?s_campaign=sm_tw

Investigators believe that after abandoning the body — taking Ritzer’s credit cards, iPhone, and underwear with him — Chism walked to a nearby movie theater where he bought a ticket to an afternoon showing of Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine.”

Mixed bag. Cate, Sally, Stuhlbarg, Dice, CK all solid. Woody can't write saucy banter, as the Sarsgaard-Cate meeting scene is a horrific rerun of Johannson-Rhys-Meyers in Match Point. And all the scenes w/ Bobby Cannavale, both the acting and the writing are just way off -- the tone is completely off the rails in that grocery store confrontation with Hawkins, which is sposed to be for laughs I guess.

and yes Alfred, I'm sure there are Park Ave hoes who don't know how to turn on a computer.

I thought Blanchett achieved a certain level of pathos (which Carol Burnett also frequently did btw)

Woah, Carol Burnett is in this?!

Agree with most of Dr. Morbius' commentary (that grocery store scene was terrible) but "mixed bag" is pretty high praise for a Woody flick in 2014 for me, I liked it.

Is it tacky to read a film in terms of the personal life of its director?
I was thinking of Blanchett’s character as the Woody analogue in this

I think I found this likable partly (largely?) because it was easier NOT to think of the main character as a Woody Allen analogue. Most of his male main characters feel like puppets delivering "stock Woody lines" imo.

lately I mean

Thought cannavale's character pleasingly layered relative to most of the others tbh, or maybe pleasingly unlayered perhaps, the clumsy stitching of clumsy layers being a major problem here.

blanchett was pretty good playing such a second rate blanche tho

dice clay had a nice turn.

Dentist scenes were awful. Everything with lokilike was awful.

overall, not as good as, say, sideways

I've been wanting to believe that the 21st Century Woody films were that point in the year when an annoying relative stops the family meal to show you pictures of their vacation or whenever you receive a family newsletter included with a holiday card. You're compelled to watch and take it seriously, but you don't really expect anything out of it. I don't get the weird defender cult he has, but maybe that's eventually what happens to anyone who becomes an Institution. Just be suspicious of anyone saying "it's their best since..." It's the mantra of the nostalgia cult.

Of course Allen doesn't know what to do with good actors, because he's utterly dependent on them to save the movie. Is Allen even engaged with his work anymore? I honestly can't tell.

Blue-collar San Francisco makes Blue Jasmine as much a fantasy as Midnight In Paris

worst film of 2013

this was not as horribly unwatchable as I expected

Way better than "To Rome With Love", that's for sure.

so many of his recent films have been so poorly constructed, sloppily underwritten, aimless, painful to sit through - I was surprised when this didn't put me to sleep, even with all of its wrong notes and weird idiosyncrasies.

can't help but lol at things like New Jersey accent = working class! "let's get sum CLAMS" indeed

there's a new woody out in a few weeks, hadn't heard a thing about it until I saw the movie poster in a theater.

thought this was quite compelling and pleasurable except (as other upthread have also noted) for the wildly off-base attempt to do "san francisco working class"- why they had these bizarrely off / cartoonish ways of speaking and acting complete with a weird Jersey-Shore-goes-to-North-Beach thing was just baffling to me- does Woody Allen not get out of Manhattan ever? does he just not know any actual, uh, poor peopl? but when that wasn't happening, this movie delivered some tough / strong stuff. Weirdly Tennessee Williams-ish, actually.

Did you learn about computers from a course

does he just not know any actual, uh, poor peopl?

I'd guess he almost certainly hasn't done for some decades.

Maybe part of the cartoonish disconnect is that Sally Hawkins is actually English

Did you learn about computers from a course

I took this to be a signal that it was hopeless for Blanchett, because I was feeling generous.

Yes, his cultural disconnect matches up nicely with this character.

All of Woody's working-class males match the "It's for my bruddah" autograph seeker inAnnie Hall.

Allen grew up in working class Brooklyn, but he has seemed to spare little thought for it since leaving. Manhattan always exuded the powerful gravitational pull for him that it often does for outer-borough aspiring artist types. New York in his movies is mostly synonymous with the Manhattan cultural elite.

In this interview I linked in the general WA thread, he says that "living in New York has got to be made practical for the middle class," but lays emphasis on Manhattan rather than Brooklyn, which in his standup routine 50 years ago he called "the very Heart of the Old World."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/18/woody-allen-on-magic-in-the-moonlight-the-crisis-in-gaza-new-york-city-and-those-allegations.html

This was disappointing. I was one of those people who said "Midnight in Paris" was the best Woody film since.... It had charm and a magic to it. Yes, it was fluffy but entertaining fluff nevertheless. I always commend anyone for trying to make an IMPORTANT FILM about the fallout from the recession but this never convinced me at all. The writing and characterization was pretty shaky. Did anyone else think it was ridiculous that Sarsgaard's character proposed to her after what seemed like a week? Allen has no idea how to write working-class characters either. They all looked and sounded like they stepped off of the set of Jersey Shore. Cate Blanchett was terrific though.

* drinks from glass of vodka clutched in shaking hand *

*pops a pill*