Burl reviews Zelig! (1983)

 

By the power vested in me, it’s Burl, here with another taste of the Woodman! Yes, it’s a Woody Allen picture, and whatever you may think of this fellow in personal terms, and deep within the chambers of your heart, he did make some good movies along the way! Broadway Danny Rose is fun, and so is Sleeper; and of course there are many others too - some of them merely okay, others very good indeed! This picture, Zelig, is one of his least typical movies, and for my money one of his best! And ha ha, I went to see this with my first girlfriend at a rep theatre on a double bill with Dangerous Liaisons! Odd but true!

It’s a faux documentary, which is a form Allen had tackled before with his very first proper picture, Take the Money and Run! But this one is much more committed to its documentary-ness and therefore much less obviously a comedy, though it’s well-supplied with jokes! It’s the tale of Leonard Zelig, a nebbish of the early 20^th century, who so desperately wants to fit in and be liked that he has gained the ability to become, in just about every way, just like the people with whom he is surrounded! By garr, he's a human chameleon!

Set (delightfully!) in the late 1920s (though almost overdoing the period detail along the way, ha ha, which I’d have thought near impossible), the picture opens with the discovery of Zelig and his strange affliction, then follows him as he’s hospitalized under the care of glasses-nerd doctor Eudora Fletcher, played by Mia Farrow, who’d made her Woody Allen debut the year before in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy! It chronicles the ups and downs of Zelig’s life as he becomes a famous oddity, then is taken into the care of his half-sister and her shady boyfriend, neither of whom give a minkling for Zelig’s well-being; then, after a murder-suicide spree among his sister and her two boyfriends, the movie tells us, Zelig is again on his own! A renewed connection with Dr. Fletcher, a cure for his condition in the offing, and a budding romance all point toward happy days for the Z man, but a sudden barrage of scandal and a complication involving Nazi Germany mix things up further for the poor chameleon!

All of this is presented in classic documentary fashion, with a perfectly-chosen narrator ("They try to pull off his diz-guise, but it is not a diz-guise!") telling the story, and a great rush of old documentary footage, newly-shot but cleverly treated-to-look-old footage, contemporary talking head interviews with (often) real people, like Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow, providing pictorial detail and additional commentary! I must say I’m in awe of some of the technical accomplishments here – the cinematographer, Gordon Willis, and the editor, Susan Morse, have done some brainbustingly admirable work in matching the new footage to the old and spiriting Zelig into shots with Hitler and Jimmy Cagney and Josephine Baker and Tom Mix and so forth! The re-creation of the Zelig life story – clearly shot to resemble a Warner Bros. production of the 30s – is note perfect too, with Garrett Brown, the dad from Uncle Buck, looking hilariously whitebread as the actor playing Zelig!

Ha ha, the picture is probably more about Allen himself than he might admit, which adds a nice layer to it all! On the debit side, the movie feels a lot longer than it actually is, and there’s a same-iness to it that sometimes causes a little feeling of drag or repetition! But that’s only occasional, and there are enough wonderfully subtle gags and a wild array of highlights, both technical and one may say structural, to override these minor issues! The newly-created novelty songs are also brilliant, and the period music perfectly selected, right up to the wonderful tune that ends the film! I like this picture a lot, and so I give Zelig three and a half houses painted a disgusting colour!

Burl reviews Broadway Danny Rose! (1984)

 

With a schvitz and a plotz it’s Burl, here to review a little more of the woodman! Yes, it’s a picture from Woody Allen, whose work we know in the form of Sleeper and Midnight in Paris and oh so many others, and this is one of his smaller works from the 80s! Ha ha, my favourite of these is Zelig, but I’ve always liked this one too - another black and white number, as it happens! Yes, it’s Broadway Danny Rose!

There’s a fraternal coziness to the picture, a tone set from the beginning, where we the viewers move through Carnegie’s deli in New York to a table of aging comedians, all playing themselves, and telling each other jokes and war stories! Ha ha, instantly we’re in a world that’s not our own, but becomes fully developed as soon as you see these guys: the meat and potatoes New York punchclock showbiz world! And the comics get to talking about a legendary figure, Danny Rose, a small-timer they clearly regard with great affection!

The bulk of the movie is told in flashback: the best Danny Rose story there is! (Sandy Baron, whom we know from his appearance in Vamp, is the comic who tells the story!) And of course Allen plays Danny Rose, who turns out to be a sweeter version of the usual Allen character: a talent agent and personal manager whose acts are all two-bit, if that, but whom Danny loves, believes in, and treats as family! His earnest solicitude towards the folk he manages is enormously endearing!

There’s not a lot of plot, but what there is goes as follows: Danny has one client who’s on a bit of a roll, namely a lounge singer called Lou Canova, played by real-life lounge singer and one-time movie actor Nick Apollo Forte! Lou is a family man (there’s a scene in which Danny has dinner with the family and asks the young daughter how old she is; learning that she’s twelve, he asks “Are you married?" Eesh!), but he has a ladyfriend on the side, Tina! She’s played by Mia Farrow, who made her Allen debut in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, and when Lou gets a big opportunity to sing in front of Milton Berle and Howard Cosell, it’s Danny’s job to escort the dame to the gig!

Of course it all goes pear shaped when misunderstandings lead to Danny and Tina being chased by gun-toting thugs! Lou meanwhile is getting loaded, and it looks bad for everybody! Ha ha, I won’t tell you how it ends, but it involves the most melancholy Thanksgiving dinner ever, and a bunch of Danny’s sad-sack acts, and it brings us back to Carnegie's!

The beautiful monochrome, the inside-baseball feel to the New York showbiz world, the nearly indefatigable optimism of Danny Rose himself, and the surprisingly solid performance of non-actor Forte as Lou, along with the perfect songs he wrote for his character, all combine to make this one a charmer! Sure, it’s lightweight, and has some uniquely creepy Allen moments, but if you can bring yourself to watch a Woody Allen picture at all (some can’t, and I respect that!), this picture, the scene with the twelve year-old aside, is among your best bets for satisfaction!I give Broadway Danny Rose three gumbas!

Burl reviews A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy! (1982)

 

With a blast of Mendelssohn, it’s Burl, here to review a minor picture by the bespectacled comedian, upon whose private life I render no judgment nor pronouncement at this time! And I guess most of his pictures qualify as minor ones, though there are more than enough relatively major works salted into his vast filmography, the most recent and likely last of them being perhaps Midnight in Paris! (Or maybe that just seems major because of the time travel, ha ha!) But this picture, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, is decidedly minor!

It was intended as such from the get-go, apparently, and, in a largely salutary way, that intention shows! The picture is an amuse-bouche set in and around a country house in the early part of the century, with a group of mostly uptown folk gathering to celebrate, or to privately mourn, some upcoming nuptials! The house of course belongs to Allen’s character, Andrew, a stockbroker who spends most of his time inventing crazy things, like the machine that takes bones out of fish, or if you prefer, although there’s no point to it, it puts bones in fish! And he’s married to Adrian, played by Mary Steenburgen from Time After Time, who has lately been ignoring Andrew in the bedroom, causing him to spend ever more time in the barn crafting his inventions!

The picture begins with its only scenes away from the Andrew/Adrian property, in which we are introduced to the high-pated professor Leopold, played by José Ferrer from Dune and The Sentinel! Leopold is an intellectual and a blowhard, and he arrives at Andrew’s house in the company of his fiancée Ariel, played by Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby! We also meet Andrew’s best friend Maxwell, a horndog medico played by Tony Roberts from Amityville 3-D! He invites candy stripe nurse Dulcy, essayed by Julie Hagerty from Airplane, along for the weekend, and thusly do we get our six main characters!

The relaxed and bucolic vibe of the movie kicks in once they’re all gathered at Andrew and Adrian’s house! Of course everyone is in love with Ariel: her Shakespearian name alone assures it! Andrew had once had his shot with Ariel, but blew it, and Maxwell falls deeply in love with her the moment he sniffs her! Ha ha! Now, I think this is one of the best performances Tony Roberts ever gave, but I must say that I found his instant obsession with Ariel one of the more irritating aspects of this picture, and it came as a distinct relief to me when he received an arrow in the heart!

Of course the picture is inspired by Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, but with 70% more neuroses added in! There's an undercurrent of melancholy, of mourning for the ephemeral, with a key line being Ariel's observation that "This beautiful summer light doesn't last forever!" All the actors are good, and I particularly enjoyed Ferrer’s pompous academic, even if he was made a pretty easy target by Allen’s hastily-written script! There are some solid laffs, and the bohankie-farce aspect, which might have been tiresome had it been allowed to fully conquer the narrative, remains under control! It’s the easy country vibe, unusual for Allen, that makes the picture such a delight, and in perfect support of that we get marvelous cinematography from the great Gordon Willis, and lovely, pastoral second-unit shooting from that bearded Finn, Jeri Sopanen, who also shot My Dinner With Andre!

The last-minute detour into the lightly supernatural fits the movie well, and the use of Mendelssohn’s music is ideal! It’s a highly pasteurized work to be sure, but as light, enjoyable, and white as a glass of chardonnay on the lawn! Ha ha, I always enjoy a country house picture, especially ones as free from Chekhovian decay as this! I give A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy two and a half musical house slippers!

(And for anybody who's interested, this is my 900th movie review! How they do add up!)

Burl reviews Sleeper! (1973)

From the future, it’s Burl, here to review the futuristic science-adventure picture Sleeper! Ha ha, yes, this is a Woody Allen picture, the same fellow who brought us Interiors and Midnight in Paris, but it’s one of his earlier ones, from before he was painted with the two-inch brush of disrepute! So, ha ha, I hope you’ll forgive me a little old fashioned movie reviewin’ on one of the bespectacled fellow’s pictures!

Sleeper tells the tale of Miles Monroe, a 1973-era health food store owner who, after a minor operation goes wrong, was freeze-dried, and now, as the picture opens in the year 2573, is being resuscitated by a group of science doctors! Ha ha the many doctors in this picture include Mary Gregory from Troop Beverly Hills, Don Keefer from Creepshow, John McLiam from The End of August, Mews Small from Class Reunion, and Peter Hobbs from The Man With Two Brains!

Of course Miles is surprised to find himself five hundred years in the future, and further shocked to discover the world is has become an anti-intellectual dystopia in which a dopey elite live for pleasure alone! Ha ha! Diane Keaton from The Godfather exemplifies the bubblehead class as Luna, Miles’s unwitting and unwilling partner in crime; but she later becomes radicalized against the government when she meets a revolutionary called Erno, played by John Beck, Pov himself from Paperback Hero!

There are lots of goofy chases set to Dixieland music, and plenty of funny stuff with the domestic robots, one of which Miles must disguise himself as for a time! It all adds up to slapstick aplenty! The best bits, though, are scenes like the one in which Miles identifies (or uproariously misidentifies) twentieth-century people and items for the inquisitive Buck Rogers-era science doctors!

Now, there’s not a lot to this picture, but I’ve always found it clever and jolly! There are plenty of laffs, and according to the editor, Ralph Rosenblum, there were many minutes of deleted scenes that are every bit of funny! But, ha ha, they were probably right to keep it under 90 minutes - a two and a half hour version would likely try the patience, though it might also address the impression I always get of opportunities missed and gags not taken! As is, the picture is little more than an amusing will-o’-the-wisp!

But I’m glad it exists, and it always tickles me to see how little effort they made in creating their future world! Ha ha, but that was the trend in those days: look at the Apes movies, or Soylent Green, or Logan’s Run! Sleeper is funnier than almost all those movies, plus it’s got Rags the robot dog, so I give it two and a half backpack copters!

Burl reviews Interiors! (1978)

Uht uht uht, it’s Burl, here with a movie that is not Woody Allen’s funniest, but turns out to be a pretty accomplished piece of work nevertheless! Ha ha, I wasn’t sure what to expect, because the word on it was (I thought) pretty bad! But most of the contemporary antipathy for it came from, I believe, a Dylan-at-Newport sort of reconfiguring a percentage of the audience felt was being forced on them! There were more than a few resentment-fuelled reviews out there, I think!

But the picture certainly has been reassessed with the wider view offered by the many years that have passed since its summer-of-’78 release! I finally saw it for the first time the other night, and it seemed at once like an earnest, beautifully-appointed drama in the Cheever style! You might call it the Cheever-Ross style, though these characters are as Anglo-Saxon as can be! It’s an extension of the Hall family from Annie Hall – or a regression, given that the family in Interiors is just the sort of family the Hall Family were parodies of!

The family in question is a well-off bunch consisting of three sisters, Renata (Diane Keaton from Harry and Walter Go To New York), Joey (Mary Beth Hurt from D.A.R.Y.L.) and Flyn (Kristin Griffith from King of the Hill)! The parents are Arthur (E.G. Marshall from Creepshow, ha ha) and Eve (Geraldine Page from The Rescuers), but they’re not together for long, as Arthur has decided that he’d like to go off on his own for what he calls a “trial separation!” Ha ha!

This causes shock waves through the family, but none more destructive than to the fragile Eve, whose bland, ascetic interior designs provide the literal half of the title’s meaning! She’s a lady with a past full of emotional turmoil and suicide attempts, and the departure of Arthur, who clearly means it to be permanent, inches her ever closer to the deep end – to the deepest end, in fact! The daughters, who are varying degrees of self-centered, meanwhile deal with their own tribulations: a creative block for poetess Renata; creative unfulfillment for actress Flyn, and a total lack of talent coupled with enough self-awareness to realize that for Joey, who is also the one tasked with keeping a resentful eye on Eve!

Two of the ladies also have husbands, ha ha! Renata is coupled with a bearded novelist who is wrestling with his own creative demons and a monsterous dose of self-pity; this fellow is played by the late Richard Jordan, whom we recall from Dune, The Mean Season and The Hunt for Red October! Joey is married to Sam Waterston from Crimes and Misdemeanors, who seems relatively problem-free aside from the mutual dislike he shares with flaky Eve!

Ha ha, the finality of Eve’s marital crisis is confirmed when Arthur brings home a lady he intends to marry, a bright-eyed widow played by Maureen Stapleton from Summer of ’42 and The Money Pit! This is a fascinating character who could easily, too easily, have been made a caricature, but Stapleton’s performance resists this most impressively! In fact all the acting is excellent, as is Allen’s Ingmar Bergman-like direction and Gordon Willis’s bleak beachside cinematography! The writing, on the other hand, sometimes verges on the edge of parody, or at least some sort of experiment by which a Bergman picture has been transplanted to New York and environs! These are some pretty self-involved people ha ha!

Finally, however, I enjoyed it a great deal more than I expected to! It fits into that category of pictures into which I also placed such salamanders as The Last Married Couple in America and It’s My Turn, though this is altogether better! I give Interiors two and a half signs of strain!

Burl reviews Midnight in Paris! (2011)

Hi, ha ha, it’s Burl to review one of the newer Woody pictures! I’m talking about Midnight in Paris, and that’s a film I was pretty interested in seeing – so much so that, as part of my self-imposed summer reading program, to prepare for seeing the picture, I read not only A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway but The Best Times by John Dos Passos! And of course I’d already read Luis Bunuel’s My Last Sigh (one of the greatest film director autobiographies ever, in ol’ Burl’s opinion!) and other relevant texts as well!

These were excellent preparations as it turned out! I had a great sense of the lay of the land in 1920s Paris, where much of the picture takes place, and an idea of what Hemingway, Bunuel, Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds and other such personages might have been up to when Owen Wilson’s wide-eyed geek wasn’t communing with them before Woody Allen’s camera! On the other hand, though, my interest in the period meant that I sort of wished Owen Wilson would just go back where he came from and we could stay in this magical gilded time to hang out for a bit, maybe by watching The Moderns instead!

Well, that’s as may be! The plot is that Owen Wilson is visiting Paris with his horrible fiancée and her horrible parents, and they chance to run into a pair of her horrible friends as well, and all of this is just so horrible that Owen Wilson, playing a successful Hollywood screenwriter with novelistic aspirations, conjures up an old Peugeot which spirits him back to olden days! And of course, as is the case whenever anyone goes back in time, he immediately meets the most famous and accomplished people of the period!

But has he really gone back in time, or is this just some elaborate psychological bid to flee an intolerable present and embrace a period he knows little about but romanticizes out of all proportion? Ha ha, the great thing is that, as Bill Murray tells us in Meatballs, It Just Doesn’t Matter!

It’s a little unfortunate that Owen Wilson’s character is such a successful screenwriter! I know he’s meant to demonstrate that it doesn’t matter how comfortably successful you are if you don’t feel you’re doing the right thing with your life, but I think he would have been a more interesting guy if he’d been, say, a short-order cook who was in Paris for the first time only by grace of the in-laws-to-be that he hates!

There are other flaws with this motion picture: some over-facile jokes and references; a too-stammery-by-half Wilson; a general feeling of inconsequentiality; but on the whole it’s a really enjoyable will-o-the-wisp of a picture! There’s some fantastic music, a few fine cameo performances from the likes of Kathy Bates, perfectly cast as Gertrude Stein, and Adrien Brody as the sort of Dali who used to teach painting on SCTV; and of course there are many lovely views of Paris, which Allen treats in the opening moments with almost as much reverence as he gives Manhattan in the movie of the same name!

Also, that French lady who sells the Cole Porter 78s may be a stock character mouthing unlikely badinage, but she’s really gorgeous! Allen, you know how to pick ‘em! I give this frolicsome trifle a solid two and a half missing detectives!