Matchpoint

[As an aside, sometimes I hate coming up with subject headings, draw a complete blank.]

Just finished seeing the film Matchpoint with Wales, whose seen it twice now. It's the new Woody Allen flick for those not paying attention to these things, and unlike any Woody Allen movie I've ever seen, although there are vestiges within that remind me vaguely of Crimes and Misdeamenors. If I didn't know Woody Allen directed this film, I would have thought it was by someone else entirely. And yes, I've seen quite a few Woody Allen films, actually all of them except for maybe three, which I've seen portions of - Manhattan,
Zelig and Celebrity. Trust me when I say this is not like any film he's done before and it will blow you away.

( Matchpoint - vague spoilers, not sure if they are spoilers, but will cut just in case. )

Highly recommend. A+

Oh my top five favorite Woody Allen Films, excluding Matchpoint:

1. Crimes and Misdemeanors
2. Purple Rose of Cairo
3. Broadway Danny Rose
4. Husbands and Wives
5. Deconstructing Harry

[Updated - there may be spoilers in the comments, but still very vague.]

ME and You and Everyone We Know...film review

Finished watching a fascinating film tonight. It's not polished and pretty like most films. But very haunting and very apropos. It is by Miranda July - an independent filmmaker - distributed by IFC.
No movie stars are in it or pretty people. The leads look like you and me and everyone we know without the benefit of makeup and hair stylists or personal trainers. People in short that the camera is not in love with and whose image has not been touched up by a specialist.

The film is called appropriately You and Me and Everyone We Know.

It is about connection and the lack thereof. The focus is on a single, lonely female artist who drives an elder cab service and her attempts to romance a recently separated father of two boys. The point of view flips from person to person, including the two sons of the father, his friend, two teenage girls, an elderly man that the female artist drives to and from places in her cab, and a curator of a small gallery. Everyone is struggling in the movie to talk to someone else, to connect to them, but can't quite find a way to do so. We watch them stumble and trip over words, misunderstand one another, and yet somehow find a way.

Like most independent films, the style feels jagged in places and the narrative wanders with no clear focus or pattern, but that's the point. The film You and Me and Everyone We Know shows rather than tells us about the randomness of events and how, oddly, they form a pattern. And it does it subtlely, in an almost absent-minded accidental way, so that you don't quite realize it until after the fact.

There's one scene in the film - where the film actually gets its title from - one of the two boys, approximately 13 years old, maybe older, prints off a computer pattern he has created from his keyboard - the symbols are ;;...,, and he tells his brother that they are an arial map of people from space. The semicolons are people standing next to people lying down, while the periods are people standing, and the commas people lying down. Then he picks out two periods and says this is you and me, and points to all the rest - and that's everyone we know. The dots make a pattern and are connected. It's a fascinating image...broken slightly by the poor father, struggling to connect to his two sons, who look nothing like him - "where do I fit in" and they respond with silence. It's not until later that they clumsily connect on a walk, the boys singing a hymn the father has never heard - called Every Stone Will Cry, another metaphor pointing out the pattern.

It's an odd film. Not one to watch unless you are in the mood and not easily distracted. Since it's contains no action and just lightly falls into place. The humor is there but is subtle and catchs you by surprise with it's odd combination of gentleness and crudeness. The movie does have a few possibly offensive bits dealing with sexuality, but also creepily normal.

Overall? Recommend.