The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985)It was just kind of serendipitous that this showed up in my Netflix queue so soon after I saw Match Point, although this could not be a more different example of Allen's work. It's light and breezy and almost ridiculously insubstantial, a silly romantic comedy that comes in under 80 minutes. I found it entertaining enough, and I liked the tribute to the transformative power of the movies, but the plotting was a little haphazard and the jokes were a little weak. Not Allen's best work, but a nice little film with a strong performance from Mia Farrow and a fitting bittersweet ending.
I also watched Tim Burton's commentary on the recent two-disc DVD of Batman, which is one of my favorite films. I've never been big on watching DVD commentaries, since I'd generally rather spend my time watching a movie I haven't seen before or even just watching the movie itself again. But I got this DVD for Christmas so that I could check out the special features, and since I've seen the movie so many times anyway, it seemed like a good way to kind of half-watch the film while learning something at the same time. I love Tim Burton, too, but the commentary was pretty weak. He had a few interesting points to make about the way he saw the characters, and a couple of insights into the filmmaking process, but he just repeated them over and over again. The rest of the time he rambled pointlessly, trailing off in mid-sentence half the time. Toward the beginning of the movie, he noted in reference to something else that he wasn't a particularly good communicator, and the commentary certainly bore that out. Maybe this is why I stick to just watching the movies.
2 comments:
How was Match Point? Will there be an upcoming review?
I've listened to some DVD commentaries, but now that I think about it, few of them were any good. The ones that involved more than one person were uniformly awful.
Hey, was The Conformist re-released in Vegas? It was just here, and it was one of the best movies I've seen. Like, ever.
I really liked Match Point. I gave it a mention in my top ten of 2005 list, and there will be a full review in the paper this week, since it's opening nationwide on Friday.
We get very, very few re-releases of older films here (the recent run of The Passenger was an exception, and the only one I can remember), and we don't have any theaters that show old films, so I doubt we'll get The Conformist on the big screen. Perhaps something to add to my Netflix queue.
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