You will meet a tall dark stranger
After a number of nice Woody Allen production, it seems like fate has to bring you at least one bad Woody Allen film, and this definitely is one. I think it’s almost even worse than “Celebrity”, but then again, I love Anthony Hopkins and Naomi Watts, so ultimately I guess I like this film better.
So what has gone wrong? I don’t know. The dialogues are okay, but that is pretty much all of it. I didn’t find any of it very funny nor witty in any way, the film was even lacking something like the end of “Hannah and her sisters”. I didn’t particularly like that film, but when Woody Allen watches this Marx brothers film and then realizes how life is worthwhile because of these small things, the film suddenly made some sort of sense. For “You will meet a tall dark stranger”, the topic of the day is faith, and incidentally, belief in something obviously completely stupid. Infuriatingly enough, Woody Allen even lets the nonsense take over the film, where the lady who believes in it achieves some sort of happiness whereas the rest of the cast is turned unhappy because of her. (At least her daughter is directly affected.) I like it when Woody Allen is self-deprecating and funny, and it is only then that I have an understanding for the characters, who are typically not without fault and downright human. I don’t really want to see a film about bad people doing bad things when their actions are not fully developed. Woody Allen has done any of those things – complicated relationships, neurotic characters, Crime-and-Punishment-like topics – in a much better way in his previous films. So what’s going on?
I’ve seen a few nice films these days and besides blogposts here, I also wrote some short commentary on them to Loris. In the process of writing those, I realized that – even though I was practically doing the same thing, that is review a film – I have been writing something completely different. The way I am thinking is entirely different when I have a specific person in mind, when I know his background and when I feel like I should write about what he wants to hear. This should be true even when I write a blog post, but I find it much harder to do. Strangely enough, however, talking/writing to a specific person about a film makes me realize things about it that I would not in the process of writing my blogpost. In this case, I’d have to tell Loris that I unfortunately disliked “You will meet a tall dark stranger”.
“Midnight in Paris” shows that Woody Allen can make extremely great movies these days, so I am not too worried about his future films. It’s just too bad that now that he finally cast Naomi Watts, he gave her such a bland role in which her acting was rather bad. It’s a shame.