Woody Allen

the writings coming fast and furious we'll see how much of the spirit I can capture.

Welcomed home on a MONDAY to a delightful home-cooked dinner, still as yet to see how nice it turns out as we're experimenting with satay in ways never before seen, but I'm grateful. Stayed late (sans dinner) to watch Melinda and Melinda, Woody Allen's latest. and WOW (as always). Woody is just so far ahead of most modern filmmakers in his ability to really capture life. Yes it's life from the view of a neurotic New Yorker, but that's eerily close to my own world view these days I guess. Anyway, a few hours removed from the movie, I feel like it was largely a remake of one of his chief masterpieces Manhattan, one of the most exquisite films every made, perfect in black and white and set to a soaring Gershwin score. The same sort of infidelity messy love/marriage thing on multiple fronts, one with a happy ending, one without. The idea that we're all flawed, but for some of us, we are our own worst enemy, while others fail yet keep on chugging. It's sad and sobering, because for many, I imagine he's not *that* far off. Anyway, the new device (besides colour) in Melinda and Melinda was the idea of parallel story-lines crafted jointly over a dinner party by two playwrights eager to craft the characters along the lines of their own respective tragedy and comedy world views. Interesting really, and very well done how Allen links together the core events to continuously remind his viewers of the two parallel stories' joint origins.

We'll break my thoughts into three pieces.

1. NYC

The last few weeks I've been forced to admit that I may have more East Coast values than I care to admit, and watching Woody Allen is enough to make you tolerate (or even desire) to live in New York. It's amazing the kind of magic he is able to spin. Now I won't say I'm abandoning my plans for San Francisco, London, Barcelona, New Zealand, or the rest of the places where my heart wanders, but basically, I feel I'm more willing to go wherever the first job lands me. I'm not going to put a particular focus on any one area, because I keep discovering that every corner of this planet has its own special beauty. Even New York and Philadelphia, cities from which I've spent my whole life running away from. Only time will tell. But setting NY to a jazz score like Woody does--he makes it into a gorgeous fairy tale cityscape in ways never imagined.

2. I've probably said most of it already, and I can't help but feel like the buffoon in Annie Hall who stands behind Allen and Keaton in the movie theatre spouting off on his opinion....but here I am. In MY view of Allen's view of the world, life is not a particularly happy event. It's full of tragedy and misfortune, pain and betrayal. He's also fond of having his characters claim it's utterly meaningless. His is a world of imperfect humans struggling to carve out their niches in life and find some small happiness from life's little glimmers of hope and joy, comedy and irony. In this respect, I feel that Wes Anderson's works follow very much in Allen's footsteps, although without the same dose of neurosis. Compare Michael Caine's character in Hannah and Her Sisters or Will Ferrell's in Melinda and Melinda (or even the non Allen male lead in Manhattan, who's name I am forgetting). They're broken men, stripped of great swaths of their dignity and traditional masculinity, shambling after a pretty thing with a rebellious heart as a coping mechanism for not understanding how to fit into the world in which they find themselves. This strikes a deep chord with me when comparing it against Kevin Spacey in American Beauty or Bill Murray in any of his latest works, from Rushmore to Lost in Translation to The Life Aquatic. Somewhere in these character typecasts and story-lines must lie a firm grain of truth about modern life. From a gender perspective I'd say it had something (from this angle) to do with the loss of the role of patriarch in modern society--but I am not trained in such studies, so I'll stop there.

3. I think if I watched one Woody/Wes Anderson/Euro trauma-comedy per week, I'd be able to forge a career as a professional writer if I really wanted to. It'd be ridiculously overshadowed by the works of these geniuses, but they simply start the sparks a churning in my mind. I get out of one of these films and my hand is itching for pen and paper, eager to carve down the poetic images graven onto my heart and mind from up on the screen. They even tune me in more to the world around me, so that the ride back on the Tube, or even the Wharf at night, takes on an eery and brilliant beauty to it, with the faces of the strangers on the underground ever so human and more emotional than say, my morning commute. Tragic comedy. This is life.

That's all I've got for now. Time for bed. Croatia posts by the end of the week.