Moot Point

So this week is Woody Allen X 5. I’ve discovered that while I like all these movies individually, this much Woody Allen at a time is really hard to take.

1. Take The Money and Run (1969): This isn’t any great shakes, but it’s funny. The cello in a marching band bit still makes me laugh every time.
2. Zelig (1983): So you know how Forrest Gump did that thing where it would magically insert Forrest into famous archival footage?¹ This is like that, except it’s framed as a fake documentary and is way more into re-creating all this cultural ephemera (like 1920s novelty songs!); and it’s kind of less showy than Forrest Gump. Watching this back to back with Take The Money, it’s sort of odd and you can see how Woody Allen does the mockumentary: he sets up this “mysterious” central figure and then gives you this really obvious but kind of still inadequate-seeming explanation for why they are the way they are. (In Zelig’s case, the desire to fit in is pathologized to the point that he can transform himself to fit in with whoever’s around him.)
3. Annie Hall (1977): I don’t think there’s a lot of things to say about this movie that don’t involve the word awesome. I certainly can’t think of any.
4. Sweet & Lowdown (1999): I know I said last week I thought Crimes and Misdemeanors was his last great movie, but this one is definitely “pretty good.” It’s funny, Sean Penn is as good as I’ve ever seen him be (his tendency toward tickyness actually works for him in this context), and the whole thing with the mute character who silently rebukes him and is he kind of projects all this guilt onto her is kind of amazing. It’s sort of weird because it has these fake documentary sections, but it’s unclear what the ontological status of the scenes are: are they cinematic recreations of what the speakers are telling us? Are they what “really” happened? The last bit with the gas station hold-up kind of points to the former, but it’s hard to know how biographers would have access to some of this information, especially when you think about those close-ups of Samantha Morton’s face when he’s playing.
5. Everyone Says I Love You (1996): This isn’t really any better than when I saw it the first time, though it’s much better if you’re watching it from an academic perspective rather than for pure entertainment value. It is interesting that the voiceover narration is done by Woody Allen’s character’s daughter, and that she’s kind of a comically unreliable narrator; but at the same time, the movie totally relies on the narration for coherence. Also interesting is the way the singing is so bad. It’s really human; it’s like he’s pointing out the fakeness of musicals and the songs he really loves. The transitions to singing are abrupt, the songs are often awkward and don’t really suit the situations (how is Goldie Hawn “Through With Love”?). Or he was trying to make a straight musical and failed utterly.
6. Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935): I really liked this. It’s one of Errol Flynn’s first movies, and it’s definitely the kind of thing they were thinking of with Pirates of the Carribbean, but without the 800 other things Pirates had going on (zombies, Keith Richards, etc.). The other reason it makes me think of pirates is how much rides on the charm of Errol Flynn in this: he has some ridiculous lines, but he’s just so much fun to watch. (“Mrs. Barlow, me darlin’, you can tell ‘em if you like that I’ve been most everywhere that fighting was in evidence: I fought for the French against the Spanish and the Spanish against the French… and I learned me seamanship in the Dutch navy. And having had adventure enough in six years to last me six lives, I came here. Hung up the sword and picked up the lancet; became a man of peace and not of war… a healer, not a slayer. And that I’m going to be as long as I’m on top of the sod and not under it.”) One thing I really liked about it was the way it took pains to clarify the political and historical context of his pirating (probably partly for the Production Code, since they had to have him be a pirate without actually having him do anything wrong); it kind of gave it a dimension you don’t usually associate with pirate movies. I have to say, though, the romantic storyline is creepy as hell, especially because they treat it so lightly. He first meets Olivia de Havilland when he’s sold into slavery in Jamaica after he’s wrongly convicted of treason for tending to a wounded anti-Jacobite (is that a thing?). Oh yeah and she literally buys him (to save him, but still). Of course things can never work until he reverses the situation and buys her (to save her from a French pirate who’d kidnapped her, but still). The movie naturally ends with the restoration of Captain Blood to his country after James II is kicked out, and his taking over the position previously held by his girlfriend’s uncle/defacto father, just in case things weren’t patriarchal enough for you. Still, it’s a good time.

¹ Which I’m just realizing was actually directed by Robert Zemeckis, he of Polar Express and Beowulf creepy motion-capture fame! That makes a lot of sense.