Miasma and Miscarriage
Melinda and Melinda is a movie about how life can be a comedy or a tragedy depending on how you look at it, and if the circumstances are completely and totally different. For example, if things go well it can be a comedy and if they go badly it can be a tragedy. It's all about how you look at it (and if good or bad things happen).If Jean-Luc Godard made this movie, it would be hailed as a masterpiece of bourgeois satire.
First, I would like to address all the critics that have hailed Woody for finally giving a dignified three-dimensional portrayal of a black person: are you on crack? "Ellis Moonsong" is yet another personification of the "magical Negro" as we have seen him in film after film, most vomitously in "The Legend of Bagger Vance." We are to believe that a brilliantly gifted and intelligent black man can find nothing better to do with his time than to screw around with two boring narcissistic screwed up white women? I'm sure the NAACP Image Awards are just gearing up.
In stretching the horizons of his actors, Woody manages to coax Chloe Sevigny into playing "Boring" and Will Ferrell into playing "Not Funny"; quite a directorial feat.
The tragedy section plays like a comedy that isn't funny. So does the comedy section.
The tragedy increases in painfulness as the film drags on, but the comedy side becomes more bearable. Not in a "funny" way but in the manner of habituation, the same thing that makes you stop smelling the monkey house after a few minutes.
Putting 3/5 of "Vanya on 42nd St." into your movie does not magically endow you with the talent of Louis Malle, Andre Gregory or Anton Chekov. Not even 3/5 of it.
If you are turning Chloe into a boring WASP (and Northwestern University - as the characters mention they went to 800 times! - produces a lot of things, but not many WASPS) then you might not want to have her say Jewish grandmother phrases like (in response to "I'm so fat"), "Everyone should be so fat!" Josh Brolin looks like Rob Lowe in "Wayne's World" if he were a blind sailor. Nice sweater.
You can't smoke inside in New York City, Woody. If you lived on Earth, you'd know that.
Everybody in this movie looks like they would rather be back where their peeking accents are from. I bet Robert Downey, Jr., is sending roses to the insurance company.
The story lines ARE NOT PARALLEL.
"Comic" Melinda describes a "tune my mother played" and then plays "Don't Get Around Much Anymore."
We're "on tenterhooks" and have a lot of "irons in the fire" and every other line is "Tell me about it", "I'll say" or "Take it from me " No wonder Larry Pine's character's plays don't attract audiences, they're written entirely in the language of cliché.
"From that moment the demons set in." Sucks. Just in case you were wondering.
It's always fun to watch actors quoting the "bartlett's familiar quotations" of texts they haven't read and Woody only seems to have combed for bad jokes.
Woody, you have become a wellspring of perennial disappointment. The visible titles on the bookshelves in the background proclaiming "NABOKOV" alone are enough to justify a new student revolution against bourgeois cinema. And nobody is named "Moe Flanders" or "Bud Silverwhatever" or "ELLIS MOONSONG." But what really annoys me, what really gets me: NOBODY CAN AFFORD THOSE STUPID APARTMENTS! By the way, this review was written by a Woody Allen fan! I even like "Another Woman" (for which I expect a medal some day), so please stop raping my memories.
But hey, if it's any consolation, I don't think you could ever make a worse movie than "Anything Else." I don't think it's physically possible.
This movie was so bad it made me long for the dignity of an Orson Welles frozen pea commercial.
score 1/10
mockturtle 23 March 2005
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1045623/35289
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