Skip Scoop
Hey Everyone! Woody Allen is like the little girl with the curl on her forehead. When he's good, he's very, very good. And when he's bad, he's awful. Yes, you've heard that 1000 times, and that's how hackneyed many of the jokes and one-liners in Scoop feel as well. I went into Scoop with high expectations given that it was his follow up to last year's brilliant Match Point and that it was also set in London and featured Scarlett Johansson. For some reason I feel it is my duty in life to see every Woody Allen movie in the theater. Many of these have paid off, but in the past decade or so, he's had lots of flops.
Scoop could not have been more different than Match Point. It was deliberately distinct in tone, obviously intended to be one of Woody's comedic films. To throw another cliche at you, they say death is easy; comedy is hard. Scoop proves it. I think the time has come for Woody to retire from being in front of the camera. His stammering, stuttering, washed-out presence made Scoop little more than an annoyance. Woody played Sidney, a magician touring London who meets Scarlett's Sandra, an American journalism student, when she is selected to take part in his disappearing act. During this disappearing act, Sondra encounters the ghost of a recently dead reporter (Deadwood's Ian McShane) who gives her a scoop that rich, aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is London's notorious Tarot Card Killer.
Got that? My level of suspension of disbelief is such that this concept did not pose a problem for me. I actually didn't mind the ghost. In fact because he was played by McShane, I quite enjoyed him. Just listening to McShane's voice is a pleasure and it was interesting to see him in a modern day role, brief though it was. What I minded was Scoop's flimsy plot, lack of character development and its scattered editing. It felt like Woody was so busy perfecting his dreadful performance that he neglected his directing duties. The film's other oddity was Johansson's appearance. I'm not sure whether the costume designer had a deep-seated dislike of her, a crush on Josh Hartnett or what, but Johansson was made to look as dowdy as possible - scene after scene showed her in unfashionable glasses, ill-fitting shorts, and baggy tops. Her hair was perpetually in a high ponytail covered with a scrunchy of all things. This decision as well as many other made Scoop the movie a much bigger mystery to me than the one ultimately solved on screen.
Before the movie I saw several new previews. The one that stood out the most was Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman (Max from Rushmore and Coppola's real life cousin). I am a huge fan of Coppola's films Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation so no matter the reviews, I will go see this movie. That said, the preview was utterly bizarre. The images were gorgeous, the problem was with the sound. This is one of those movies where everyone is speaking English either with a British or French accent, EXCEPT, the star of the movie, Dunst, whose every line sounds like something spoken by a valley girl. It's like she thinks she's in the movie Clueless and everyone else thinks they're on Masterpiece Theatre. I already have to wonder what the heck Coppola was thinking. There's a fabulous story here, but I can already tell it would have been so much better if actual French were spoken. I think audiences (at least those actually willing to see a period film to begin with) are able to accept subtitles. Current release date is 10/20/06.
Boulder Bumpersticker of the Day: Support Your Local Universe.
-sunday
Scoop could not have been more different than Match Point. It was deliberately distinct in tone, obviously intended to be one of Woody's comedic films. To throw another cliche at you, they say death is easy; comedy is hard. Scoop proves it. I think the time has come for Woody to retire from being in front of the camera. His stammering, stuttering, washed-out presence made Scoop little more than an annoyance. Woody played Sidney, a magician touring London who meets Scarlett's Sandra, an American journalism student, when she is selected to take part in his disappearing act. During this disappearing act, Sondra encounters the ghost of a recently dead reporter (Deadwood's Ian McShane) who gives her a scoop that rich, aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is London's notorious Tarot Card Killer.
Got that? My level of suspension of disbelief is such that this concept did not pose a problem for me. I actually didn't mind the ghost. In fact because he was played by McShane, I quite enjoyed him. Just listening to McShane's voice is a pleasure and it was interesting to see him in a modern day role, brief though it was. What I minded was Scoop's flimsy plot, lack of character development and its scattered editing. It felt like Woody was so busy perfecting his dreadful performance that he neglected his directing duties. The film's other oddity was Johansson's appearance. I'm not sure whether the costume designer had a deep-seated dislike of her, a crush on Josh Hartnett or what, but Johansson was made to look as dowdy as possible - scene after scene showed her in unfashionable glasses, ill-fitting shorts, and baggy tops. Her hair was perpetually in a high ponytail covered with a scrunchy of all things. This decision as well as many other made Scoop the movie a much bigger mystery to me than the one ultimately solved on screen.
Before the movie I saw several new previews. The one that stood out the most was Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman (Max from Rushmore and Coppola's real life cousin). I am a huge fan of Coppola's films Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation so no matter the reviews, I will go see this movie. That said, the preview was utterly bizarre. The images were gorgeous, the problem was with the sound. This is one of those movies where everyone is speaking English either with a British or French accent, EXCEPT, the star of the movie, Dunst, whose every line sounds like something spoken by a valley girl. It's like she thinks she's in the movie Clueless and everyone else thinks they're on Masterpiece Theatre. I already have to wonder what the heck Coppola was thinking. There's a fabulous story here, but I can already tell it would have been so much better if actual French were spoken. I think audiences (at least those actually willing to see a period film to begin with) are able to accept subtitles. Current release date is 10/20/06.
Boulder Bumpersticker of the Day: Support Your Local Universe.
-sunday
posted by Sunday at
4:08 PM
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