Match Point

friend's sister says SJ looks like playdoh

NO, surely not.

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she started laughing before I did but stopped before the guy in the baseball cap two rows in front

such bad actors w/ much worse lines

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I wonder if this will be the last.

http://familyscreenscene.allinfoabout.com/graphics/chasing_liberty_goode.JPG

I...sort of liked it. I was actually surprised that I did! It made me cringe on occasion (the carpets in the Swiss Re building!), but I think it's probably his best film since Sweet & Lowdown (which isn't saying much, I know). Both of the two leads were pretty poor, but it was an interesting film.

chris: "have you tried yoga?"
nola: "no."

obv any yoga chris has done was superficial tennis-player stuff (stretching, psyching himself up for matches), and nola's never sought out any lost in translation-style eastern enlightenment.

*runs away*

I think I agree with jody on this. It was sort of slow, but finally Woody Allen made a film with a tangible moral dilemma in it! After SO long in the desert.

I was delighted to see Paul Kaye as the landlord. A wok!

ralph lauren is a big supporter of independent film (and one of his sons exec-produced the squid and the whale); maybe they're friends.

although, if it's a comment on rubbish films, it isn't bad

that was one of the only things i really disliked. i hate it when filmmakers do shit like that!

*cough*

I can see why RJG was annoyed by the Crime And Punishment thing, but the whole film wasn't like that!

I would like to see an non-British director make a film in the UK that isn't about the upper classes.

Do people in England not say "yummy" and "I've got some serious cocktails to make"? If the dialogue seemed off, wouldn't the British actors have corrected it? I don't think Woody Allen is as intractable about his dialogue as Mamet.

What about Closer? I guess that's upper-middle. And it was written by a British person. (Maybe I'm thinking about it because of all the partner-swapping and infidelity and the pretty young American character.)

Woody is sort of obsessed with class in a weird way. Specifically, he still clings to the notion that class and taste are inextricably tied: part of what I didn't like about Small-Time Crooks was that the big joke for the second half of the film seemed to be that Tracey Ullman's character has these awful nouveau-riche tastes, and then of course Hugh Grant has to come in as the symbol of the real upper class: snobby and British. At the same time, the depiction of the wealthy Hewett family as operagoers with leatherbound books in their library didn't bother me because of the English setting, where I think taste and class are more bound, perhaps.

he grew up in lower-middle-class jewish brooklyn, about as far as you can get from the old-money wasp culture he's so fascinated by. he views it as an outsider -- he's attracted to the manners, the low-volume conversations, the generosity-for-its-own-sake. it's interesting to compare it to the world he grew up in himself, and pretty easy to understand why he'd be so anxious to trade up.

Like the pointless tour of New York architectural wonders in Hannah & Her Sisters, Gena Rowlands and her collection of "favorite Rilke poems" in Another Woman, and Sam Waterston dropping the most tin-earred Kurosawa reference of all time in September?

No.

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Both of these things were totally plausible! Perhaps you've forgotten how stupid people can be?

Like American, only more specific.

the shotgun - both barrels from a 12-gauge TWICE and no one in the building (or the buildings next to it) notices? Bullshit. Dude who stopped by the apartment certainly would have heard it.

never convinces me that JRM loves his new life enough to murder for it, never convinces me of anything in regard to his character, really.

Interesting, but a failure. The S-Jo/JRM romance takes up far too much of the middle section without being interesting.

I'm shocked that so many of the reviewers I've read didn't think the dialogue through most of the movie was bad enough to merit a comment. Just awful. Though, I have to say, aside from the shotgun-noise thing mentioned above, the last 1/3 or so is a pretty decent little suspense movie.

Actually, some of the country house scenes (especially by the pool) made me think of Footballer's Wives.

this is my first woody allen movie. why did it turn into a murder mystery? does he often just smahs the plausibility veneer and just meander off? i dunno. reminded me of gosford park in that way.

I agree! Bad AND weird!

As people have said, the dialogue is shockingly poor, to the point where people in the cinema were laughing at lines that weren't supposed to be funny. Yes, the actors are very attractive, but I just ended up being repulsed by them. It's like we were being offered SJ in a wet shirt as a substitute for anything entertaining.

I think those lines are supposed to be funny and I like the awkward performances.

My biggest problem with the film is that there is NO WAY in hell that he would have gotten away with once the police read her diary (and REALIZED she was pregnant) or performed an autopsy (and REALIZED she was pregnant.)

I don't think so, no.

Yes, and it is also set in London!

it just seemed like a film done by a ok direcotr who had a slightly sharp sensibility for how relationshiops and a slightly keen sense of the minutiae of peoples actions tics and so forth.

it was pretty clumsy, is what im trying to say.

I'm worried that some of the bits towards the end that were quite striking and well done will stick in my head and that I'll forget how much it sucked and watch it again in the future.

i liked that ghost scene the best, like when he starts rambling on about sophocles

Actually, I know what you mean. And you're kind of right. This is not in any way a typical "Woddy Allen film" and so a lot of the things that he is acknowledged at being "good" at doing are not present here. Essentially, he is an excellent old-school comic writer. He doesn't really do dialogue and he doesn't really have a dramatic sensibility. He gives people funny things to say and he can concoct a pretty tight comic premise. What he can't really do is have (sorry about this horrible term) a feel for his material, in terms of structure and tone and how performamces and writing feed into this and support it. This is why it is such a surprise that I enjoyed the movie. I almost think it was good despite him, to be honest. Certianly the last 45 minutes just seem to run away with the whole thing and wander off somewhere.

But see some other Woody Allen films, ambrose, before you decide about Woody.

I should correct this. He does do dialogue, but not dramatic dialogue.

I was worried that spiel was too much a summary of popular notions about woody allen waiting to be disproved, to be honest.

http://www.scarlettjohansson.org/gallery/albums/magazines/elle-jan2006/normal_04.jpg

Both of these things were totally plausible! Perhaps you've forgotten how stupid people can be?

That whole scene reminded me of the Scott Peterson/Amber Frey story where he duped Frey into thinking that he was in France when actually he was at Laci Peterson's candlelight vigil.

I was also reminded at how much I dislike ScarJo.

this is very OTM. He's such a dogmatic filmmaker that any bit of business not in his original scenario is ignored; he is not a director for whom a canvas overflowing with madness (a la Preston Sturges or Paul Mazursky) or an exquisitely directed ensemble (a la Jean Renoir) comes easy, although he's come close a couple of times. The list of actors who give numbing performances (Meryl Streep, Sam Waterston, Helena Bonham Carter, Claire Bloom, Helen Hunt, and, um, Woody Allen) in his films is at least as long as the ones who outdid themselves.

Wow, what a mixed bag. He's possibly never moved and framed with the camera better, JRM's quite splendid besides from the twin Bermuda Triangles of his lips, philtrum and baby blues, and even Scarlett J is only embarrassing in every other scene. But who ever thought the day would come when dialogue would be Allen's biggest handicap, when it was the first strength he had (albeit with jokes)? Some of that shit coulda come from the movie Mia's watching in The Purple Rose of Cairo!

The critics' claim 'you'd never know it was by Woody,' oh boy. Ostentatious use of Caruso, Dostoevsky, Sophocles etc, WASP-envy (I wonder who coined that), JRM calling his tennis students PUPILS like Woody in Husbands and Wives (hey Wood, they're only pupils if they're under 14) ... all totally unseen before in his oeuvre.

ambrose, what 'murder mystery'? There's no mystery.

miss legrand OTM on SJ as uncracked Courtney Love!!

Brownie points if you spotted the cast member this has in common with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

how quaint

I was gonna ID the movie's comeshot as the Thames-side picture window, but M Atkinson in the Voice already did: "Allen is one of this nation's most unapologetic wealth pornographers, here savoring the massive estates, stables, ultra-high-end retailers, the breakfast nooks that literally look out upon Westminster Abbey, the libraries filled with more leather-bound books than the filmographies of James Ivory and Harry Potter combined. Could Allen ever be interested again in poor people, American or otherwise? Both Chris and Nola are designated as low-income 'outsiders,' but nobody's at a loss for high-life, high-rent funds..."

i know! the people saying that prolly only think of woody as "the annoying jewish guy who robbed mia farrow's adoptive cradle." but even in his '60s days as a stand-up and humorist, he was making jokes about philosophers, composers, mathematicians. and it's an amazing thing that he's still so talked-about in this climate of "git-r-done" humor.

(now if only he'd make a movie out of "the whore of mensa"!)

mmmmmmmmmmmmm. some of us LIKE to swoon over how the other half lives! including woody allen, who i think for all his money, still sees himself as never being able to fit in.

Could Allen ever be interested again in poor people, American or otherwise?

it's just not what he writes about. people who criticize him for this are mostly doing it from a defensiveness-of-exclusion, but filmmakers are under no obligation to represent anyone. moviemaking is fantasy; think about how many movies get made per year and how few of those are realpolitik documentaries or realistically gritty man-on-the-street fiction.

Does Woody Allen not speak to other human beings and realise that NO-ONE FUCKING TALKS LIKE THAT!? I'm acquainted with some fairly poncey Londoners but none anywhere near as cuntish as this lot. I can vaguely understand why Americans might like it (although the American girl I went to see it wth really didn't), fitting as it does with the idea that all brits live in massive mansions, go to the opera 5 nights a week and speak oh-so properly but really, what a complete steaming turd-pile of a film this is.

I actually thought SJ was the only decent thing about it - she did her best with some of those truly painful lines she had to deliver and was the nearest thing to a believable character in the whole thing.

Morb: but Woody does have some obligation to a film's verisimillitude. No one talks like the charaters in Singin' in the Rain, but the film maintaints its structural and tonal integrity. If Woody can't write properly arch British English, the fault is his.

it did not work, which is too bad because there was some great business w/the supporting cast. a crime of passion needs a little, er, passion, doesn't it?

"'What’s a beautiful young American ping-pong player doing mingling among the British upper class?' Chris asks Nola. I wish Groucho were around to answer that."

Seeing Scarlett J on SNL this week, I am shocked that she actually has promising broad-comedy chops (in the service of the usual mediocre to piss-poor material) she hasn't shown in films yet. Could augur well for the upcoming Woody comedy she's in.

There are most certainly some intentional chuckles in the film... Brian Cox has a couple nice ones. And it's good to see that yob from Trainspotting has cleaned up his life andjoined the po-lice.

During the alleged steamy sex romps, I just got a yucky feeling watch JRM pour oil on SJ, imagining Woody just out of frame. "ummm, just let it drippp..."

Also, he (Woody) is supposed to have a talent for cashign, but I think his choice of actors has been pretty unadventurous for a long time, or at least too overtly geared to the likes of 50-60-something male film critics.

casting too overtly geared to the likes of 50-60-something male film critics.

So yer looking for Johnny Knoxville and Paris Hilton? I don't understand.

Casting = (at least recently) pretty drab, interesting-but-predictble choices. It'd be fascinating to see Woody come to terms with his age, or at least use an ensemble dominated by older (i.e. 60+) actors -- and at least the acting would be better.

some of us LIKE to swoon over how the other half lives!

Sure, but that's at odds with the purported theme.

The 2001/MP actor is the estimable Brit stage dame Margaret Tyzack (Russian bureaucrat and unlucky neighbor, respectively).

http://imdb.com/name/nm0001859/bio

http://imdb.com/name/nm0879239/bio

jrm is only slightly believable as a straight man.

Oh hstencil I bet you say that about all the lippy britishes/irishes boys! But there is this from Scarlett J:

“He’s a fantastic actor, intense, gorgeous and funny,” she said. “But I can say for sure I never had a passionate encounter with him. He’s a really sexy, brooding guy but he’s very gossipy. He likes shoes and it was like having a girlfriend on the set.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10696087

Well, that explains the tan...

I liked RJG's posts.

SJ is meant to be hanging out with Josh Hartnett, anyway. That's OK.

Travolta grabbed some guy's ass at the Oscars last year I heard.

Long Woody interview from a Lincoln Center event transcribed by that smelly website... It's pretty good at getting the Allen cadences tho:

"I saw this guy in BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM and I thought he was just HOT—-And fabulous, and he is a wonderful young kid who is full of emotional and turbulence and torture – the guy goes to get the NEWSpapers and it’s a tragedy – "

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=22092

Well, the celebrity gossip site says that he is very friednly and nice in real life. His daughter in The Shield is played by his real-life daughter.

I was a lot funnier in improv classes than I was at The Improv on West 44th Street!

My gf said he (or his look-a-like) is a good tipper so I can confirm that, I guess.

I am totally waiting for a cease and desist order to swing my way.

THERE IS NOTHING GAY ABOUT THE SHIELD
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THERE IS NOTHING GAY ABOUT THE SHIELD
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THERE IS NOTHING GAY ABOUT THE SHIELD
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(Alex's gf is awesome, btw, and only partly cuz she laughed at my jokes)

so i guess JRM has been peddling this schtick for awhile. does he want to be a nouveau steve mcqueen or something? there's just no humor, no humanity no nothin.. surely the film would work better if we LIKED the guy a little bit?

This is a movie about a social climber, a man without real taste who reads the CLIFF NOTES on Crime & Punishment (think about it) and covets the lifestyle and trappings of people much wealthier and WASPier than himself. He shops at the fancy shops with the big names on the front, because that's what these people do. He goes to the opera, but he doesn't actually give a shit about it. He's driven to make terrible mistakes by his own carnal desires, flirting with a fall fom grace as if he is just waiting for the worst to happen. JRM is a pretty face, but yet he doesn't come across as calculating or intelligent or even very charming in the film. He's not even funny like Branagh or Cusack or any of the surrogate Woody Allens of years past. But he IS a stand-in for Woody - he's the physical manifestation of all of Woody's basest impulses and neuroses (the REAL dirt, not the thin existentialism of a movie like Crimes & Misdemeanors). This movie is the (last?) confession of a 70 year-old schlub who STILL can't quote Kierkegaard or Mcluhan without sounding forced, STILL looks like shit in an expensive suit and STILL hasn't got to fuck enough young pretty blonde girls.

Maybe it's his most personal film yet.

Cliff Notes - trying too hard.

no. at not point did i think that jrm's character was being presented as "sympathetic."

Also unless Cliff Notes look dramatically different in the UK, I am pretty sure that JRM is reading Crime & Punishment and not an abridged version. But I could be wrong.

But yes "THE EXPRESS PURPOSE" was a bit of a rhetorical exaggeration. I didn't mean to offend. ;)

The guy is basically a hot Zelig. Have you ever flattered anybody in a Club You Were Desperate to Join? Then I think you can see the character's 'humanity.' (tho I must admit the script is ultimately too "life is shit" for me.)

I'm saying this is Woody Allen saying I'm an ugly dirty old fucker with no class and I kind of want you all to know except I don't.

Allen has been saying in many recent interviews he'd much rather go to the Knicks game than a museum and only learned about serious lit and art to get girls in bed. Wheteher that's another pose, I dunno. His most relaxed comedies emphasize or acknowledge his working-class roots (Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Radio Days).

The 6 or 7 explicit refs to "luck" were way too many; he could at least have used "fortune" a couple times.

he repeats himself a lot. i don't mind, but i notice it from time to time.

I wondered if it was, but couldn't be arsed to actually check the running times on all of them. But yeah, he usually makes 95-minute films, and this one was something like 140.

:)

http://uk.penguinclassics.com/static/covers/all/2/3/0140449132L.jpg

I guess they chose these because they are recognisably "British" book covers, and they are tasteful, long established firm etc etc.

I don't understand half the comments on this thread. If you have a problem with JRM showing that he's reading C&P (and then he's reading the Cambridge Guide to C&P, which is critical essays, not quite Cliffs Notes), then really, Woody is not your director! He's all about showing his work, showing the things he's been thinking about while making the work.

I could go back and copy and paste and comment on any number of things in this thread, but eh, life is too short.

The time thing -- the 90 minute mark is about when she announces she's pregnant, I think, and I had this strong feeling that the film out to be ending around there. Which, of course, it didn't, which was another way he increased the tension, the sense that the shoe has to drop any second now, but it doesn't, and there are many little fake-outs at the end. It strings you along like the ending of a huge Mahler symphony, except good.

But it IS about poor people, at least two 'jumped-up' ones -- JRM and SJ.

To those who find it a failure -- is Woody just an inept dramatist, or a venomous misogynist?

http://www.moviesintofilm.com/matchpoint.htm

It's not a comedy and there aren't any intellectual, talkative, self-obsessed, witty Allen-like characters in it - yet Allen's presence is unmissable in the way the logic of the film uncoils. I thought Rhys-Meyers was quite well cast. The lead character is a bit of a cipher, and I think he's supposed to be, but Rhys-Meyers has enough of a melancholy, dewy look in his eyes to suggest that he might be guarding some deep, dark secrets. Scarlett Johansen was somewhat more questionably cast, but I think she manages to redeem herself by bringing to three-dimensional life a potentially dangerously underwritten character.

I think the people who criticized the film on the grounds that it's not clear that Rhys-Meyers loves his wife enough to kill someone in order to stay with her miss the point. He doesn't kill for love - except possibly for love of himself. I also thought the ghost scene at the end teeters on the edge of not working, but is crucial to the emotional resolution of the film, esp. since Allen so pointedly denies us the avenging angel of justice that he disingenuously promised us with the whole brilliant ring sequence.

you're absolutely right... i should have specified that i was talking about the MILIEU. also i was arguing against some vague strawman in my head.

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OK, long past the opportunity ...
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Well, it certainly is contrived. There are a few plot twists that hinge on coincidence - and not just at the end. But I think the film survives those contrivances because the emotional truth is there - ie., sometimes people are homicidally selfish, and sometimes the bad guy does get away. I think perhaps the greatest weakness in the cast was Scarlett Johansen. She's good at showing someone who kind of aimlessly proceeds through life, and its believable that she would get involved with Rhys-Meyers against perhaps her better judgment, and she remains likeable throughout, which is key to the logic of the film - however, I think she doesn't quite summon the right emotional pitch of frantic desperation towards the end when she is increasingly despairing of Rhys-Meyers intention to make an honest woman of her. It would have been better if she was more desperate, because that would have made Rhys-Meyers own act of desperation more believable. Perhaps that's a weakness of the script though, and shouldn't be blamed on her alone.

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I thought SJ was much better in this film than in any other, maybe, but not v good

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Actually, I think you're right. It's just too hard to imagine ScarJo going emotionally off the rails like that. She doesn't do depressed very well.

the last few police scenes were so bad that they may as well have had, like, an epilogue flash up on screen telling us where they found the ring and what it meant

In a sense, you're right. The way these scenes progress violates several rules that I'm sure they teach in screenwriting classes. All the coincidences, the pat conclusions, the way that the seams of the plot show - certainly these are things that would torpedo a genre thriller. However, Allen clearly has bigger fish to fry, and his embrace of the artifice of film-making is done knowingly, and he provides enough winks to the audience to let them know that he has more in common with Brecht than he does with Michael Mann.

quick, someone photoshop this to say "O RLY?"

anyway i loved brian cox's character... how allen didn't HAVE to make him an asshole. and didn't have a scene where he obliquely & quietly threatens jonathan r-m with the loss of his position if he ever makes his daughter unhappy. it's all there beneath the geniality.

No, it's her flailing high-school drama 'rage' too.

Well, it does establish that her only available way to deal with stress is in overdrinking. It's true that they don't show her drinking (while pregnant) but it seemed implied.

JRM is soooo pretty but such a weak actor.

It's curious that Jonathon Rhys Meyers actually did grow up poor in Ireland, and then climbed into upper class English circles, and yet somehow in the film it is totally unconvincing. He is such a painfully bad actor.

Golly, it's almost as if you expect a poor Irish kid who has climbed up into upper class English circles to behave in a certain way -- to be marked in certain ways -- that an actual poor Irish kid who has climbed up into upper class English circles doesn't behave.

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So I'd have to act a different way to make them believe I was a gay man from New York City.

This is not a problem with my behavior, though, since after I am a gay man who grew up in New York City and I'm just behaving like myself -- it is hard to get more "valid" than that. I am, by definition, acting like a gay man who grew up in New York City. This is a problem with their expectations.

So when you see a poor Irish guy who climbed his way up through English upper-class society acting like a poor Irish guy who climbed his way up through English upper-class society, to say that you don't believe he is behaving like a poor Irish guy who climbed his way up through English upper-class society says little-to-nothing about his behavior and everything about your expectations.

this was the confusion. I see what you are saying, now, but don't think it is v useful, though, since it almost seems to mean you shouldn't bother thinking about/judging any character whose life experience does not closely match your own

Cathy: He seemed like a middle class English person, trying to be a toff, making up a story about being poor and Irish.

I mean, I agree -- that's when I thought when the movie revealed him to be a poor Irish kid -- "is he really? he's not acting that way at all". But the movie insisted he was. And so why should I doubt it? I mean, perhaps JRM himself comes off as a middle-class English person. Or perhaps if you're trying to assimilate upper-class features, you get the [easier?] middle-class features down first. Or... there could be any number of possibilities, and you have to assume that not every Irish kid who claws his way up is going to behave the same, or even in a remotely similar way. It's not even as if the character did something completely improbable, such as not knowing how to properly speak English.

The other possibility, of course, is that, in the world of Match Point, that's exactly how these Irish boys who claw their way to upper-class assimilation behave. Since that's how the movie says they behave, and nothing seems to indicate that we should be suspicious of this, then there's not much advantage to disbelieving it.

After all, there isn't supposed to be that sort of correspondance between "the real world" and "a fictional world". Moments of correspondance exist to help us enter and understand the world but fiction is a set of understandings and assumptions and rules that create their own situations and tensions and whatnot -- and those rules might match up to "the real world"'s rules sometimes but they will never match up all the time. And the value of a work of fiction is not in how those rules match up to "the real world", but rather in how work out amongst themselves, within the fiction.

That's the other thing that this discussion is making me think of. But I have probably not explained it adequately. I need to go get some coffee I think.

Woody’s terror of death used to be funny. It used to invigorate and provide depth and originality to his comedies. Now, as he edges over the hill of seventy, his fear of death has become all too real to him, and in consequence, to us. Now it hangs around his movies like a millstone around their necks, dragging them down into a swampy mire of the author’s misery and pessimism. Woody is so terrified of death that it is as if he doesn’t dare to laugh at it anymore. The result is, in his attempt to not “be there when it happens,” Woody has all but disappeared from his movies.

... The message of Match Point is that life is shit and everyone is a bastard, that it’s all random chaos so you may as well just commit murder, live an empty shallow life, and enjoy your creature comforts, because you’re going to be just as dead in the end anyway. Apparently, this passes for wisdom among sophisticated folk. Really, it’s just cheap cynicism. And where some people saw the strokes of a master artist, all I saw were shit stains on the wall of Woody’s cave.

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/53/woody.htm

i also like how sj's character took a while to be revealed for what she was, and liked the ping-pong setup in that regard.

the ending was very well shot and put-together too. but yeah, thematically c+m gave the same feeling with a much bigger jolt.

i worry that when woody casts himself these days he can't help but be all tick and artifice -- there's too much that goes with him now. anything else solved that pretty nicely i thought, & the only reason i see for the hate on it is that ppl. don't appreciate the acting chops of jb and willow.

biggs' "hey, i'm a dopey nice guy" shtick was perfect tho for grafting allen-isms onto.

The person Morbius quotes is entirely wrong about the "message" of the film, but might be right about Woody's mortality.

I've heard enough Allen interviews on MP that while he doesn't endorse murder, he pretty much shares the tennis bum's view of the universe's workings. I thought the Bright Lights writer's comment that the last 40 years of physics have come close to invalidating such nihilism was provocative and not something I remember seeing anyone argue before (not in a film essay, anyway).

And the facile "ball falls on right side of net; they find the ring" device seems way too unlikely to be random chance. It's probably a weak deus ex machina thing Allen pulled out of his butt but within the movie itself it almost (contradictory, I know) looks like an intentional irony of fate that the cosmos pulls on Chris. It's kind of a strained reading but I thought it was Chris' bad luck to always be lucky, to get what he ostensibly wants without ever having any real wants or desires. Like there was a conscious agent who pulled a fast one by allowing him to get away with the murder, depriving him of the one thing he might have really wanted, concrete knowledge of the existence of that very agent or at least a basis for meaning. Twisty, and probably off the mark, but there it is.

Anyway, lots of comparisons to the Patrick Bateman character in American Psycho, but without the all the hilarity.

That review is completely awful, misreading Woody and physics in order to fit his preconceived notions.