BEFORE: Well, the next Woody Allen film in the chronology would be "Annie Hall", which would have been great to watch around Oscar time, since it won the Best Picture award for 1977. But, I've already seen that, so I'm skipping it. But that film does provide the acting link from Woody to Diane Keaton (last seen in "Love and Death")
I did watch the Oscars live (well, almost live, I was always about an hour behind on my DVR), which is something I have not done in years. I hadn't seen most of the nominated films, but I was still pulling for Cate Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine", since that's probably the next film from 2013 that I'll be watching. Plus she gets added to a long list of actors actresses who have won Oscars or nominations for starring in Woody's pictures, like Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Mira Sorvino, and Penelope Cruz.
THE PLOT: Three sisters find their lives spinning out of control in the wake of their parents' sudden, unexpected divorce.
AFTER: This feels like a left turn in Woody's filmography, not just because the material is so dark and depressing, but because you can't really see any connection to a film like "Bananas" or "Sleeper" - you'd be hard pressed to see how this film could be directed by the same guy. And without the connective tissue of "Annie Hall", it's even harder.
Here's what I think happened: "Annie Hall" did really well, got a lot of great reviews, won Best Picture, etc. etc. And it's a funny film, but it's also a serious film, a relationship film, about a man trying to figure out where a relationship went wrong. When it struck a chord with audiences, the director fell into a sort of a trap - thinking "Aha, this is what people like, well I'll give them even more of the same in my next film!"
I say it's a trap because ultimately this leads directors to try and make the film they think people want to see, rather than the film that they themselves want to make, or the film they should be making, or the film that wants to get made. The public is notoriously fickle, and anyway they tend to have very visceral and simplistic reactions to things, so trying to satisfy the public is like kicking a field goal when the goalposts are constantly moving back and forth.
Anyway, I ended up taking this as sort of a precursor to "Hannah and Her Sisters", which is one of my favorite films, and seems to share quite a bit of plot in common with this one. Both films feature three sisters, two of whom are married (one to a cranky creative guy named Frederick) and the third is an unsuccessful actress. Also, one has shifting career goals and doesn't know what she wants to do with her life - that's a lot of plot points to have in common, however "Hannah and Her Sisters" is ultimately comical and generally positive, and this one just isn't.
Then again, if you take the entire Woody Allen filmography as one big genre, then of course you're going to see elements repeated from film to film, like divorce and feelings of inadequacy and guys named Frederick. Because those are things that occur in various families and settings, so you'd expect to see certain things again and again from a man telling dramatic stories. I can't really say the man ripped himself off, but then even if he did, what's the harm?
Anyway, this seems to really be about the way that family members tend to talk, and sort of undercut each other, giving each other back-handed compliments that are really insults. At one point, one of the sisters calls her father's girlfriend a "vulgarian", but I thought she said "Bulgarian", which didn't seem to make much sense. Although that character did just return from Greece, which borders on Bulgaria, and some of Woody Allen's previous films made fun of Armenians, so I thought maybe this was just a sort of play on that.
They say this is an homage to Bergman, however I have no experience with Bergman's work, so I'm out of my depth here. I can only take the film as I take it, based on the experiences I have had. And one of the night scenes was so dark that I had to check Wikipedia to see what was taking place.
Speaking of my experiences, I had to scramble today because I heard from Bill Plympton, who's over in Europe at the Anima Festival in Brussels. It seems the first screening of "Cheatin'" on DCP (Digital Cinema Package) was screening way too dark - in brightness, not in subject matter. I had to rush to the lab that made it today with a co-worker to investigate. Somehow they outputted the file to our digital drive with the colors way over-saturated, and the contrast jacked way up. This made the night scenes, like the ones at the carnival, much too dark. So I had to contact all the festivals that are currently screening it and let them know to screen from the back-up BluRay we sent, and NOT from the DCP on the drive. I probably should have checked the quality of the DCPs before shipping them, but there just wasn't time. But the lab should never have let these DCPs go without comparing them to the source files - the problem would have been obvious if they had. Now I have to get the lab to re-do their work, get the drives back from the festivals, and then get them shipped out to the next festivals in line. Such is life in the trenches of independent animation-making.
Also starring Geraldine Page (last seen in "The Pope of Greenwich Village"), Mary Beth Hurt (last seen in "The Age of Innocence"), E.G. Marshall (last seen in "Compulsion"), Kristin Griffith, Richard Jordan, Sam Waterston (last seen in "Heaven's Gate"), Maureen Stapleton (last seen in "Nuts").
RATING: 3 out of 10 analysts
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