kami_k

"It's like anything else" seems to be the key expression in Woody Allen's recent venture, but can we suppose that the professional chronicler of the intellectual dilemmas of our time has reached a big dead-end that can not even be called a dead-end? That's the general impression as far as you consider the character of Allen himself, an over-paranoid, talkative and sad-faced pessimist who is more like an authentic ethnic comrade for resolutely gun-believing Charlton Heston in Bowling For Columbine than any of his previous impersonations of seasoned New Yorker trying to find a solution for the riddles of love, God , loss and death. This can be attributed to a number of factors, the most important of which may be simply old age and its inevitable sense of loneliness.

Allen has always beguiled us with characters looking like self-portraits but really allusions to intellectual anxieties that can be common and emphasized to the point of being ridiculous. What's his particular point, if there is any, here? According to Allen Anything Else is the whole reaction that some anonymous taxi driver and maybe all taxi drivers- including Albert Brooks in Taxi Driver after listening to De Niro's inarticulate statements of desperation and alienation- can show to a passenger's ramblings about his or her own life and at the end of the film Jason Biggs ,for once at least, finds the real equivalent of a funny anecdote before himself. Does it suggest that after all ,his failed affair with Christina Ricci and the vanishing of a burning love that he thought he could never leave behind, his confessed fear of sleeping alone, Ricci's innocent infidelity... and most importantly the fact of him getting over all his past and leaving the quintessential Woody Allen city a.k.a. New York for a presumably uncertain but at least financially promising future is like anything else?! Why should a taxi driver be more helpful than that? or could he?

The film is not passionate about anything at all and is imbued with a sense of over-disillusionment that reaches its peaks whenever Allen delivers his stream of anecdotes and jokes which he believes carry meaningful truths about life. He opened Annie Hall with one of these jokes and in a way this is some kind of a reprise of that groundbreaking opus of his career. He is now an old comic teaching and most accurately filling the head of a new comic with his own lifetime's findings And there is an intellectual and different girl played by an updated emblem of difference- as idiosyncratic as it may be- who is Christina Ricci and who can not continue living with the aspiring comic writer. Allen seemingly gives the center stage to the young couple so that they enact the old play of desire and discouragement and they try to be true to the Allen's long-pronounced idiom and axiom. Nonetheless the whole set-up seems hopeless and I don't know if it should sound like a complaint or a compliment. The hopelessness as a given fact looks just like what Allen intends to deliver. Anything Else is not fresh, in fact it seems like actors tend to drain life out of it altogether. I sure don't look for some amazing novelty of rhetoric when I see a new venture of his, but I always wish for some special insights that do justify appreciating these repeated tales of Thought and Doubt" with their more or less fixed settings. Despite all the indifference that Allen here seems to show toward this wish I found some solace in one rather selfish insight that interprets selfishness in a new light. Biggs' biggest problem is presented as being unable to say "no" to anyone, even if it is to his benefit, and his biggest achievement occurs when he stops behaving according to this habit-turned-frustration. His ultimate triumph is him getting ready to move to California no matter what happens there. Allen's character is more like a catalyst than a real person and eventually doesn't accompany the young writer. There is not much need for him because we have fully identified Biggs by now: a feeble surrogate but still a surrogate for Woody Allen, equipped and ready to go with the same anxieties, hesitations, uncertainties, suspicions, dissatisfactions and self-deprecations that have characterized a load of contemporary personal histories for the last thirty years. How much more truthful it is to say that he is a surrogate for the loyal audience of Allen, an audience who has learned his lessons of life and love by watching those films. Then if you are one of them you see in Biggs what has happened to you and what an obsessive analyzer/critic of human relationships you have become. And after a short pause you realize that it's for good and not only that, you being like that, like him, thinking and re-thinking in this hard-earned way of his, is like "anything else".

A Woman is a Woman belongs to the period when Godard was playful, uninhibited and really a wild child of the movies. So when he made a musical, in fact he made a childish and free imitation of a musical that at the same time showed, in an Godardian analytic way, how the Hollywood musicals usually depict life and love. In the film characters love and evade committing to love at the same time. There is music by Legrand and spontaneous looking movements which are aspirations to dance but at the same some oblique realism is at work. As with Godard, fantasy and realism interact in a dialectical way so that both seem indistinguishable after a while.

The trio of Brialy, Belmondo and Karina is great but Karina is obviously unique in that she makes the whole subject of performance seem out of place. She is there playing innocent, dumb, inviting, sad etc. and again at the same time she seems NOT THERE as though her mind is some place else. Her big eyes work and shine all the time but they don't give away the character. There is no argue about Godard's style which after so many years and so many innovations in the language of film has remained fresh and unsurpassed in vitality and an acute understanding of "Films as Games" or rather "Life depicted as a game within a game". However watching A Woman is a Woman after some years I still wonder at the their cinematic child: Acting as a sort of being there and being free to feel the film, breathing the air of movies. The plot is as unimportant as it can be. In its place moments show up, little but infinitely joyful moments of adults looking like teenagers amused and fascinated by the thought of being in a musical comedy. Was Godard the biggest daydreamer of the cinema or what?

This is six minutes of introduction to the world of Martin Scorsese. You may anticipate a story but it is only portrait of an obsessive shaver who shaves until he makes a bloodbath out of his face. A gruesome sight to average spectator ,and in one shot even to a more sophisticated one when the man pulls the blade from one end of his neck to another and acts very convincingly, this short film is an unblinking portrait of violence and especially personal violence for that matter, with a strong streak of masochism familiar to the fans of Scorsese. A man shaves or punishes himself for no apparent reason but cleansing(his face or his soul?). Also you can see the making of a director infatuated with the montage who will use its techniques for years to come.

The Big Shave also displays an effective use of two colors in jarring contrast for an aesthetic purpose: white of the bathroom and red of the blood. White and Red devour the character and the viewer and signal the world of a director in love with radical shifts and juxtapositions. overall a student film from Scorsese in retrospect is a lesson in film history. Experiment is the prerequisite of perfection. The jazz song which accompanies the whole film and unites its images has been wonderfully used.

I saw this first film by Ackerman on french channel Arte and I was fascinated by its simplicity of conception and execution. Ackerman gives a wonderfully quiet example of small, no-budget, personal short film which can be a lesson for any young and fresh student of film or anyone with a great passion( but not much means) for film-making and recording the world with a camera. young Ackerman plays in the film and from the first minutes you get the mood and the means together as the soundtrack of the film is solely composed of constant humming of some tune by -supposedly- the main character who is a lonely girl living in an apartment. This is one of the most ingenious approaches to the composition of film music I have ever heard! and you wonder if it has been repeated again. We follow the girl entering the building, up the stairs and into her small kitchen and very soon realize that we will only see HER. She keeps humming and even makes appropriate noises when attending to things in the kitchen. The obsession with the kitchen leaves one wondering " Can a kitchen really drive someone mad?". Here domestic life of a lonely woman seems like an unbearable and crushing prison with no hope of redemption( a theme that Ackerman returns to it later with great force). When the girls cooks and cleans and gradually makes a mess of everything you get a comical view of quiet breakdown rarely seen. Fixed camera position is in accord with a claustrophobic mood and also relates to a documentary style camera which the film emulates to some extent. This is a film about what we may -and usually will- call domestic hell ,though it never loses sight of intrinsic humor of the situation. I love Ackerman's performance and her determination to be a filmmaker, standing on her own feet and making an amateur film a must-see.