Really in two minds about Woody after all the scandals and also after his long career has been tailing off somewhat. But I watched this latest one, little released and reviewed and was quite pleasantly surprised.
One, Woody’s films and scripts are definitely 20th century, there are sometimes continuity issues and lots of poetic licence and despite the wisdom they all contain, none are going to change the world. Rainy Day is nevertheless an enjoyable enough tale, with a good pace and excellent photography by Vittorio Storaro. Gatsby, a monied young student rather adrift at university and full of the usual Allen neuroses, takes his girlfriend Ashleigh (Elle Fanning)
to New York for the weekend. He wants to show off in the city,
taking her to the best hotel, restaurants, etc and she has to interview a film director for her campus magazine. They soon get split up, Ashleigh embroiled in a series of adventures with depressed film makers and Lothario stars and meanwhile Gatsby catches up with the sister of an old flame,
his brother, goes to a poker game and tries to avoid his mother’s fall party. We get glimpses of different sides of NY life, all seen through rain as one farcical moment leads to the next.
This is not one of his strongest films at all but it has a light charming tone and lots of good moments. Timothée Chalamet is effective as Gatsby but others shine more. Liev Schreiber has fun as the director, Diego Luna, likewise. Selena Gomez
is a revelation as the sister and Cherry Jones
has a terrific cameo towards the end.
♦♦♦
to celebrate the 50thbirthday of one of their group and the three days promise to be a mixture of partying and secrets being revealed.
and co-written by two of the other protagonists
is supposed to be a sort of X-ray of 50 something women reaching a key moment in their lives: one has just lost her job, another is recovering from surgery, another wants to make a key career move, another wonders about her marriage to a perfect boor and so on.
and Maya Rudolph
whose character I liked best did what they could with the script but I quite frequently asked myself what the point of certain things were (which included most of Jason Schwatrzmann’s character’s appearances).
There is also a really unnecessary scene where they bitch at a bunch of millennials at an art gallery. Some of the denouement was just all too tidy and incredible.
It is a short, smart intelligent work which looks at the sacred cows of society today: politics, academia, freedom movements, in vitro fertilization, etc. A great cast manage to lift this work even more led by Kristin Scott-Thomas
as the lead, Patricia Clarkson, superb as her cynical best friend, Timothy Spall
as her ailing husband, Cherry Jones,
Emily Mortimer, Bruno Ganz
as the aromatherapist husband of April and Cillian Murphy as a banker.
Filmed in black and white and accompanied by an excellent soundtrack of jazz and classical music, this is an unusual work for our times and a very well-produced one indeed.
passionfilm 