The current cinema

4 Comments

• Oliver_C says:

  July 27, 2013 at 3:47 am

  You man­aged to find a still from the movie that was­n’t orange-and-tealified!

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• mw says:

  July 27, 2013 at 12:02 pm

  I’m curi­ous about the “Streetcar” angle. Seems every crit­ic men­tions it but I can­’t find any ref­er­ence to Allen or any­one asso­ci­ated with him acknow­ledging it. All I read is that he got the idea from the Madoff saga. And that Blanchette recently acted in the play, but she says it’s a dif­fer­ent performance.
  So where did that trope come from? Is there some inside info avail­able to crit­ics? Is it pos­sibly a case of crit­ics par­ti­cip­at­ing in a phant­asmagor­ic circle jerk? Or is it just so blatantly obvi­ous that no one can miss it? That seems like the obvi­ous explan­a­tion, but then you write “this movie is not a story of anarch­ic sexu­al­ity and its destruct­ive power” and if that’s true, how can it be a knock off of Streetcar?
  I’m try­ing to talk myself out of plunk­ing down the exor­bit­ant tick­et price and see­ing for myself, but it just sounds so intriguing.

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• Kurzleg says:

  July 29, 2013 at 9:05 am

  I just hope that your din­ing with Tilda Swinton included much less nervous sweat­ing than the Nicholas Cage’s did.

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• mw says:

  July 29, 2013 at 12:20 pm

  Well, I shelled out the $9 to see Jasmine. Had nev­er been to BAM Harvey, but if you’re going to pay ludicrous prices to see films that may or may not be any good, that’s cer­tainly the place for it. The screen is fant­ast­ic and there are plenty of good seats. Wish they’d ban pop­corn though. Really stinks up the place. As it’s primar­ily a theatre theat­er, it could be justified.
  The movie itself left me a bit cold. It was tech­nic­ally very com­pet­ent. I can­’t think of a film that has ever handled flash­back sequences that well. It’s gen­er­ally well-written and well-acted. The Jasmine char­ac­ter, how­ever, has no redeem­ing fea­tures, learns noth­ing, and changes not at all. The only way I can get bey­ond appre­ci­at­ing such a well-made movie and actu­ally lik­ing it is to think that Ginger is the main char­ac­ter. She actu­ally has an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter arc. She starts out in one place, moves in the dir­ec­tion of some­thing else, suf­fers a set­back, and learns some­thing from the exper­i­ence. If the real point of Jasmine is that she is just the cata­lyst for Ginger’s arc, it would be a much bet­ter story. But for that to be the case, it would need to be edited with a slight change of emphasis.
  After see­ing the film, I still find all of the A Streetcar Named Desire talk in the reviews annoy­ing and won­der where they came from. For what it’s worth, I went with my daugh­ter, who stud­ies film and has seen a stage pro­duc­tion of Streetcar and had­n’t read any reviews, and she did­n’t notice any sim­il­ar­ity. Sure, on the level of fallen rich sis­ter moves in with work­ing class sis­ter, the sim­il­ar­ity is there. But bey­ond that, there’s pretty much noth­ing. It’s almost like say­ing any film about a detect­ive is based on Crime and Punishment. And I’ve looked a bit more and have yet to find any evid­ence that Allen gave any thought to it when he wrote the script. But, yea, I can see the cir­cum­stan­tial evid­ence, between the basic set up and the cast­ing of Blanchette. It’s just I find it inter­est­ing how every single review talks about and won­der how that came to be. It reminds me of a story about Edward Limonov’s release of his nov­el “It’s Me, Eddie.” He or his pub­li­cist dropped the line that he was the Johnny Rotten of Russian lit­er­at­ure and then every single review com­pared him to Johnny Rotten. Did some­thing like that hap­pen with Jasmine. Or did every single crit­ic think the exact same thought? Or once the first few prom­in­ent crit­ics men­tioned it, did all the crit­ics have to men­tion it? No offense inten­ded, Glenn. I obvi­ously like your work a lot. Just curi­ous about what was going on with this par­tic­u­lar film.

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