Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Phantom Lady / Bride [was: Woolrich recommendations? ]

From: Steve Novak ( Cinefrog@comcast.net)
Date: 24 Feb 2008


OK...I haven¹t seen Match Point but I just read the critique from Guardian, UK¹s Peter Bradshaw and he finishes like this: ³Match Point has some interesting moments and a clever twist at the end on the theme of chance and fate. However, as Allen's next movie is reportedly also going to be set in the UK, he really is going to have to learn to speak British at something better than tourist level²....Hmmm...not very engaging ...even less engaging is a thorough review (imdb is a good start) of his DP¹s previous shoots and experience, and most of it is straight UK TV...nothing very moody and noir or shadowy there in Remi Adefarasin¹s background...and, if you talk Œnoir¹ in film, the choice of your DP is absolutely key....

...but I¹ll ask a much simpler question: why would anybody think of Woody Allen (a good satirist & filmaker, and an original one...30 years ago) as a noir/harboiled director...whatever that is anyway...It difficult of course
(and not healthy) to put people in boxes and lock¹em there...but in this case, it¹s pretty much clear cut...He has done film that had mood, that were dark, but from there to harboiled...hmmm...

I haven¹t seen the film I repeat, but if anything this review from Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice doesn¹t tempt me further:
³ Serve and Folly - Woody Allen's Cannes-hyped, Brit-inflected latest is a mildly pretentious mediocrity - What we think about when we think about Woody Allen: the Woody of the 1970s, parodic nebbish-genius turned self-satiric nebbish-romantic, whose films bore rich, thick meat and yet could produce belly laughs in the educated middle-aged. The Woody of the next decade, workaholic shotgun-spray auteur, who made some kind of progression toward maturity and inventiveness every other film. And the Woody of late, recycling menopauser and master of mannerism, his scenarios tame remakes, his characters instantly recognizable as meta-Woodys aping the man's trademarked delivery. Given the career entropy, his survival has been remarkable, as is the forgiving shower of accolades shepherding his new film, Match Point, home from Cannes. A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon, the movie sports a British veneer, and this relative oddness has been cause for "return to form!" sighs of relief. But Allen is, alas, pushing forward and downward into de-fertilized soil badly in need of crop rotation.....²

Montois

On 2/23/08 7:12 PM, " DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net" < DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net> wrote:

> Patrick wrote:
>
> "MATCHPOINT is perhaps the best modern noir film made in the United
> States."
>
> Uh, dude, it was made in the UK.
>
> Mark
>
>

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