Song of a Reformed Headhunter

It is tempting to describe Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine  (2013) as a Madoff scheme of A Streetcar Named Desire . Last night at the Lincoln Plaza cinemas with GH, WL and DM, I kept expecting the infusion of Allenesque comedy into the Williamsian tragedy to pay off, but it never did. WL was right in describing the serious scenes as melodramatic. I thought only two minor characters carry whatever moral weight the film possesses. Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), the first husband of Ginger, loses all his money and his chance of setting up his own construction business. Their marriage breaks up. He makes visible the human devastation of Hal's scams. Closer to home, Danny, son of Hal, the Bernie Madoff character played by Alec Baldwin, is the innocent victim of father-worship. The short scene in the music shop, in which Danny (Alden Ehrenreich) pleads with his mother Jasmine to get out of his life, is searing. Cate Blanchett is fine as the deluded Jasmine, the Blanche character, but even s...

GH and I went with P and J last Saturday to watch Woody Allen's new film "To Rome with Love" at the Angelika. I liked it more than his last movie "Midnight in Paris." For one thing, the Rome movie, unlike the Paris one, did not hang on a single conceit, and an endless procession of semi-believeable mimicries of famous personalities of 1920s Paris. "Rome" consisted of four stories, unrelated in plot, but connected through the common themes of love, fame and aging. The best story had a pair of Italian newly-weds coming from the countryside to the Eternal City for the first time to meet the husband's influental relatives. For them Rome was a place of confusion but also of experience. They returned to their small town, wiser and surer of their rightful place. Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi were pitch-perfect as the hapless innocents. Another story had Alec Baldwin finding his younger self (played by Jesse Eisenberg) in Rome when he was ...