Let’s Just Go Ahead And Declare Today Trailer Day – Here’s A Whole Crop Of New Ones

It’s always interesting to just let yourself fall down the rabbit hole of the interwebs and see where you wind up. This time, the first link was a note that I got about The Founder, an upcoming movie starring Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, the guy who… well, he didn’t exactly start McDonalds, but he was responsible for it becoming the fast food behemoth that it is today.

At the same time, I noticed that a new trailer had also been released for the Independence Day sequel. Yeah, te original is problematic and full of plot holes, and the ending makes no sense whatsoever, but it remains just a fun turn your mind off and go with it movie, and if Independence Day: Resurgence can at least come up to that standard, I’ll be happy enough with it.

From there, it was on to another upcoming supposed summer blockbuster, the return of Matt Damon as the titular character in Jason Bourne.

Lights Out is one of those horror movies that looks like it could either be completely terrifying or completely crap. The trailer definitely shows some promise, though, so I think I’m willing to give it a shot.

New Woody Allen movies, it seems, have become an annual tradition, This year’s offering, represented by this international trailer (complete with, for some reason, French subtitles) is Cafe Society.

I’m not sure how Nine Lives snuck in here, except possibly for my love of Kevin Spacey, but here ya go anyway.

The next few caught my eye mostly because of the talent involved with them. First up, The Girl on the Train with Emily Blunt, whose work I’ve really liked lately

Next, The Infiltrator with Byan Cranston and John Lguizamo

And though I don’t like the term modern noir much, that’s the vibe I get from Manhattan Nights with Adrian Brody and Yvonne Strahovsky

I don’t know much about Chevalier, but the premise looks like it could have some promise.

The Last Heist is another one of those movies that seems like it could really go either way. The trailer doesn’t excite me that much, but the premise of one of the gang members actually being a serial killer seems as though it could add at least another level of intensity if it’s played right

Next, a couple of trailers that have me hoping we might see some smart science fiction movies coming out this year. First up, Equals with Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult. I’m not completely sold on this one, because the trailer mostly makes it look like another romance just covered in SF trappings, but maybe.

Then there’s this little oddity called Ickerman

Next, there’s this odd looking gem which features Liam Neeson: A Monster Calls

And to wrap things up, here’s one that, like the Russian movie Guardians which I featured here earlier in the week, shows that America isn’t the only country that can make superhero movies. It’s from Finland as is titled Rendel.

So those are just some of the trailers that have caught my eye recently. If you’ve got some that you want to share, please do so either in the comments section below or over on the Facebook page. I’d love to see what has you guys (and gals) intrigued or excited.

 

Cattin’ Around With Peter Sellers, Peter O’Toole, And Woody Allen – What’s New Pussycat? (1965)

A quick hit of Google shows the word “farce” defined as “a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations”, and I can think of no more apt description of 1965’s What’s New Pussycat? than that.

Directed by Clive Donner and starring (among many others) Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen, the movie was actually Allen’s film debut, and also his first produced script, and it shows all of the comedic restraint of a Marx Brothers movie on uppers combined with an ending that seems to come straight from a Keystone Kops comedy. In other words, none at all.

The plot of the film, such as it is, finds O’Toole playing Michael James, a notorious womanizer – today he would probably be described as a sex addict – who is trying to find a way to be faithful to his girlfriend (portrayed by the lovely Romy Schneider) – while he decides whether or not he is actually ready to settle down and marry her. This decision is not made any easier by the fact that every where he turns there is another beautiful woman who falls for him and wants to take him into her bed.

Meanwhile, Peter Sellers, in the role of Michael’s long-haired Austrian-accented psychoanalyst Dr. Fassbender proves to be of very little help since he is also cavorting with one of his patients while trying to avoid a run in with his literally Brunhilda-like wife (yes, in this movie, the “fat lady” does literally sing, though that doesn’t signal that “it’s all over”).

There are also numerous other characters who become involved along the way including Michael’s potential in-laws, his various friends/acquaintances/love interests – including a debuting Ursula Andress who literally falls from the sky into Michael’s car – and, of course Allen himself.

All of this eventually leads to the characters converging on an out-of-the-way French chateau -where all of the rooms are named after famous lovers-as they wind up converging in a single room in a scene that can’t help but remind one of the packed stateroom in the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera.

Oh, and that Keystone Kops reference I made earlier? Yeah, that follows soon after when the entire entourage is chased by a number of policemen across the city to a scene that eventually winds up in an extended go-cart chase complete with crashes galore.

As I noted above, this is not exactly the kind of movie where the word “restraint” is applicable, except for one notable exception, and that comes, surprisingly, from Woody Allen. That’s not to say he fits in any less than the other characters as far as the comedic absurdity goes, but fortunately at this point he had not yet developed the twitchy characterization of “Woody Allen” that would soon become the focal point of his early comedy and the leading characteristic of those trying to impersonate him.

In the end, there really is a lot to like about this movie – despite the impression I may have made so far, there are the touches of brilliance and great lines that characterize any of Allen’s scripts – but  your enjoyment is really going to  come down to just how much you can accept the broad over the top characterizations and yes, farcical elements of the plot and script and your tolerance level for out and out absurdity. Personally, I say give it a go, but be careful. There may just be a runaway go-cart right around the corner.

The Fragrance Of A Rose, And Its Thorns – Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

This is my entry in the 1984-A-Thon, being hosted by Forgotten Filmcast. Be sure to click on the picture in the sidebar or this link to check out the entire line-up of blogs and reviews that are celebrating this great year of movies. The last time I looked, there were 135 movies being covered by 115 different bloggers, so there should be lots of great reading ahead and something to please everyone. And a huge thanks to Todd for giving me a chance to participate and for host what should be a really fun blogathon.

If you enjoy the fragrance of a rose, you must accept the thorns which it bears.
– Isaac Hayes

I’ll admit, I’ve had a sort of love/not love relationship with Woody Allen‘s films over the years. I put it that way because there are some that I definitely love, and others that, well, I feel like “hate” is too strong a word for the way I feel about them, but they just don’t live up to what I would like to see from a man I consider one of America’s most talented writer/directors. I also should admit that I haven’t seen a whole lot of Mr. Allen’s most recent films, a shortcoming I really need to correct.

That being said, Broadway Danny Rose has always been among my all-time favorites of the director’s films. It has just the right amount of tenderness and absurdity to turn what could, in other hands, have gone wrong in so many ways into a true tour-de-force, and a movie that, like many of Allen’s films, reminds us of a time that doesn’t really exist anymore, and probably never actually did, at least not quite like this.

It also contains one of my all-time favorite movie gags, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Broadway Danny Rose opens with an ever-expanding group of comedians sitting around a table at New York’s famed Carnegie Delicatessen swapping jokes and stories. Eventually the name of talent agent Danny Rose comes up, and one of the comedians says that he has “the ultimate Danny Rose story” which he then proceeds to tell.

The story that then begins to unfold is one of wins and losses, comedy and tragedy, right and wrong, loyalty, betrayal, absurdity, love, hate, anger, forgiveness,  and many other emotions.

But most of all, it’s a story about humanity.

Simply put, and without going too Yiddish, Danny Rose is kind of a loser. More than that, he is a loser who has surrounded himself with more losers. He’s a talent manager (not just an agent, as he actually gets personally involved in almost every aspect of his clients’ lives) who represents clients such as a one-armed juggler and a blind xylophonist.

His biggest act, however, is Lou Canova, a washed up lounge singer who suddenly finds himself on the verge of a comeback due to a nostalgia craze that may allow the spotlight to shine on him again, at least momentarily. After years of supporting Lou through thick and thin, it seems as though Danny may have finally managed to get Lou his second big break when Canova is invited to audition for a spot on a TV special being put together by “Mr. Television” himself, Milton Berle. Of course, this would be a huge break not only for Lou, but also for Danny, who might finally have that client who hit the “big time” and didn’t leave him as soon as the pastures seemed to be turning green, as has happened to the agent so many times before.

Unfortunately, there’s just one complication to all of this, and that complication has a name – Tina. You see, Lou is on his third marriage, but he has, unknown to Danny, fallen in love with his mistress, a woman named Tina, who he insists has to be at the show or else he’s convinced he’ll completely bomb the act. However, since Lou’s wife will also be at the show, it appears that the only solution is for Danny to act as Tina’s date for the night, or as the movie puts it, for Danny to be “the Beard”.

Reluctantly, Danny agrees to this plan, but then even further complications arise when, on the day of the big show, Danny arrives to pick up Tina only to find her on the phone having a huge fight with Lou. Having heard rumors that Lou was also seeing someone else, she tells him that there is no way she’s going to come to the show. Hanging up on Lou, Tina runs out on Danny and heads for the estate of her mobster ex-boyfriend, where a party is being held. When Danny is mistakenly identified as the man who stole Tina away, the pair suddenly find themselves on the run form a pair of mobsters who have sworn to avenge their brother’s honor.

It’s during this chase that the gag that I mentioned as one of my all-time favorites occurs:

I’m not going to go too much further into the plot, because I don’t want to spoil the rest for those of you who might decide to give this little gem a try. Instead I’ll simply say that throughout the ensuing pathos and humor, as I mentioned above, the most enduring quality that the film embodies is the inherent humanity that is at the heart of the best of Allen’s films. Because despite what happens, despite the plot twists and chaos and confusion and absurdity, the one theme that underlies the entire film is that of the connections that we make in life. Yes, in the end, people are people, and sometimes they will make choices that disappoint or hurt, but at the same time, in the end, life is about connections. Those we miss, and those we make.

It’s those connections, finally, that this film celebrates, and in those connections it is that Allen finds, in a way that makes it seem, looking back, as one of the transitional films from his earlier, more broadly comedic films to the more serious movies he’s tended towards in more recent years.

And it’s the film’s humanity that shines through the whole enterprise and makes it not just one of my favorite films of 1984, and not just one of my favorite Woody Allen films, but one I think I could happily include in a list of my all-time favorites.

 

 

 

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• Star, Smile, Strong: Keeping Confident about the Visual Irony in BROADWAY DANNY ROSE (reelclub.wordpress.com)
• Broadway Danny Rose (1984) (moonwolves.wordpress.com)
• Broadway Danny Rose (nehovistecose.wordpress.com)

Top 250 Tuesday: #213 – Manhattan (1979)

Continuing to wend my way through the Sight and Sound Top 250 Greatest Movies of All Time. This week, it’s #213 on the list, Woody Allen‘s Manhattan. For a longer introduction and a look at the full list, just click here. And if you want a heads-up on what I’ll be watching for next week in case you want to watch along, just head on over to the Facebook page or follow me on Twitter (both of those links are in the sidebar) where I’ll be posting that info later in the day.

Sometimes it’s funny the way things work out. I’d originally planned on writing about Woody Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan a couple of weeks ago, but it got delayed by my chance to see both L’Avventura and In the Mood for Love on the big screen. (Click the titles for my write-ups on those two movies.)

As it turns out, those two films, along with Manhattan actually provide an interesting triptych of films as they each serve as contemplations of love and relationships that particularly relate to the place and time in which they are set.

Now, don’t get me wrong, these are all three very dissimilar movies in most every other way, as they should be, again considering their varied settings, but at their heart, in a way, they all three seem to be asking, and trying to answer the questions “What, really is love?” and “How do we express (or repress) our feelings for each other?”

Just a little bit of recap: in Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura, we follow protagonists Sandro and Claudia as they ostensibly carry on a search for their missing friend (and Sandro’s lover) Anna against a backdrop of early 1960s Italy. I say “ostensibly”, because the film actually turns into am exploration of their own developing relationship, which seems to only be more and more encouraged by the society they are in. Wong’s In the Mood for Love, on the other hand, is set in a very different society, that of mid-60s Hong Kong which is much more stifling, meaning that the two eventual lovers at its core, Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen must be extremely discrete in expressing their growing affections, not only publicly, but even to themselves and each other.

Which brings us to Manhattan. Allen’s film, obviously set in late ’70s New York, also depicts and explores various interpersonal relationships, and is also very much a depiction of the mores of its time and setting and how it affects not only the development of those relationships, but their expression.

At its core, Manhattan actually explores three different relationships: that of Allen’s 42-year-old Isaac Davis and  his 17-year-old lover Tracy (and no, I’m not going to get into any reflections on Allen’s real-life relationships, I’m only here to write about the movie), Isaac’s best friend Yale Pollack and his wife Emily, and Isaac’s ex-wife Jill and her lover Connie. Oh, and into this already potentially volatile mix, we also have to throw Diane Keaton’s Mary, with whom Yale is having an affair.

So how dooes this particular time-and-place setting affect these various couples and how they carry on their relationships? Well, fist of all, because of the hustle and flow of the city itself there is a certain immediacy gained by the proceedings that, unlike the bed hopping of Antonioni’s film, feels much more natural and less forced. Also, because of the large city setting, it is possible for these people to carry out their interminglings in a way that is actually very public, yet at the same time still feels intimate and private. New York is, in this film, at least, a place where for the most part, secrets can be kept, even if they are not really secret. That is, I think, a large part of the outrage that Isaac feels about the pending publication of his ex-wife’s tell-all book. Even though most of his inner circle already probably know everything that is going to be in it, it is the concretizing, especially against his wishes of those details that is the real betrayal, even beyond the actual circumstances of their break up.

Third, it is a time and place of exploration and acceptance. This is why there is not much questioning either of Isaac’s affair with the much younger Tracy (beyond the question of is she right for him) or of the lesbian relationship between Jill and Connie at a time when such relationships were much less accepted or even spoken about in the much broader world. Thus, unlike Wong’s lovers, none of these couples have the pressure upon them to hide their developing feelings or to find reasons for the kind of subterfuge that Su and Chow must undertake even though they really haven’t acted inappropriately toward one another at all. There is not that oppressive feeling that even the suspicion of improper activity could bring doom and discredit both to man and woman.

Finally, the city, with its hustle and bustle, which to an outsider can often seem massively confusing and impossible to navigate, provides an apt reflection of the interweaving of these people’s lives as they flow into and out of various relationships with each other, much as one eventually learns how to navigate into and out of the hustle and flow of its streets and sidewalks.

As far as the rest of the film goes, yes, it is beautifully rendered, with it’s sweeping shots of the title city and the music of George Gershwin which permeates the proceedings. The choice of shooting in Black and White as opposed to color I think was a very smart one, as there is no way that Allen could have achieved the timeless feel that he has here otherwise, and the introduction of color would probably have seemed more intrusive rather than actually adding anything of value.  There really can be no denying that Allen has created a masterpiece, but to be honest, this is another film that, now that I’ve seen it, I doubt that I’m going to feel the need to revisit it.

So what are your thoughts on Manhattan? Is it a movie that you’ve seen or would like to? If you have seen it, is it one that would make your own Top 10 list? Or would it not even crack your Top 250? Let me know below.

Related articles

• Top 250 Tuesday: #021 – L’Avventura (1960) (durnmoosemovies.wordpress.com)
• Review: Woody Allen’s Manhattan (sixdegreesofmariotestino.wordpress.com)
• Our Favorite Woody Allen Movies (splitsider.com)

Woody Allen, Aspiring Pimp? Yeah, That’s What We Get In The New Trailer For Fading Gigolo (2013)

This is actually not written and directed by Woody Allen, though I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought so. Instead it’s John Turturro‘s upcoming flick Fading Gigolo, which also stars Sophia Vergara and Liev Schriber.

No release date yet, but I’d expect it before the end of the year.

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• John Turturro’s ‘Fading Gigolo’, starring Woody Allen, reveals a trailer (buzzhub.wordpress.com)