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Reviews
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004)
Some good moments and impressions in an overall non-period pot-pourri
Not having read the Thornton Wilder novel, it's hard to compare. There are flickers of good acting, but too many leaden (and unidiomatic) lines too, with the pot-pourri of today's in-your-face accents (none Spanish, none suggesting period Peru or Spain) and acting/speaking styles not heightening the illusion or the involvement. The theme of ambition, self-interest, exploitation, hypocrisy and injustice, together with uneasy (and unsuccessful) attempts to square it with faith and providence is handled well, though, probably thanks more to Wilder than to this film's too often clumsy attempts to evoke the period (nowhere more anomalous than in the acoustics: the lines spoken and the eclectic musical sound-track); visually it seems better (but hard to judge whether these effects are more faithful than the obviously off-base acoustics). Kathy Bates has her moments, as does Geraldine Chaplin (her accent less at odds with her role). The male leads are more memorable for some of their facial expressions than their too often awkward and anomalous lines. The younger parts (apart from the twins) are too thin to do much with, apart from the Perichole role, which seems to have been a missed opportunity to craft into something more memorable. -- Istvan Hesslein
Melinda and Melinda (2004)
Can one do a comic and tragic version of the *same* story?
The Midas Touch is the Kiss of Death for an artist. I'm not sure whether Woody Allen (WA) was ever an artist, but now that everything he touches is treated as gold, it's clear he has nothing to keep him on his toes. Melinda and Melinda (M&M) is a dreadful film. Badly written, badly acted, badly directed. The idea of doing the same basic elements as a comedy and as a tragedy might -- just might -- have been something more than a gimmick if something creative had actually been done with it; but it is all just a series of Woody Allen sit-com set-pieces. The actors are coached to imitate WA's mannerisms -- helped out by the increasingly stereotyped, dreary and predictable lines WA usually utters during all the gesticulating and whining: This was all good once, for a while, when it was fresh. But recycled by a crew of somewhat amateurish WA impersonators? The elements of the pretentious pseudo-culture and pseudo-intellectuality -- which some of the older WA work was ambiguous enough (and funny enough) to leave us thinking might have been done by someone at least capable of discerning the real thing -- here become transparent for what they really are, and always were. How many more films like this will it take (there have already been too many) to confirm definitively that WA is and has always been just a gifted comedian, not a thinker, not an artist?
Melinda & Melinda may even be starting out from an incoherent premise: maybe the idea of doing the same story as comedy and tragedy doesn't even make sense: The two Melinda stories (in one, the "tragic", she had left her doctor husband, lost custody of two kids, and killed her unfaithful lover; in the other she had also broken up with her partner, but had no kids and killed no one) were in fact *not* the same story, told comically and tragically! They were two different stories! And all the people were different! The two Melindas were not even the same person, just two people sharing some superficial similarities (recent relationship problems), played by the same actress.
So it was all an empty gimmick. An artistic and intellectual challenge would have been to keep exactly the same *facts* in the two versions, and leave the differences in the two stories to be only in the *attitudes* to the facts. And even there, the choice would have to be whether to make everyone's attitudes different in the two cases, or just Melinda's. And the problem (though soluble) would be not to let the differences in attitudes lead to any differences in facts that would again make the two versions diverge arbitrarily. (After all, a "fact" is not only that I am divorced from my spouse and murdered my lover, but whether or not my friends approve of my behavior, because their approval leads to words (facts) and those lead to actions and reactions from them and me (also facts!))
My guess is that it *would* be possible to do a comic and tragic version (even "comic vs. tragic" is sort of arbitrary: does WA just mean funny vs not funny, or less funny? or a tendency to see the same cup as half full vs. half empty, which is at risk of being a cliché?) while keeping the facts the same. But that would really require thinking and insights, not the stereotypes, clichés, trendy talk and scenes, and glib quips WA's M&Ms actually amounted to.
Istvan Hesslein