Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with some more news on the lovely Miss Scarlett Johansson... this time we get a review of Woody Allen's newest flick, MATCH POINT which stars the beautiful future Mrs. Seaman. I'm a sucker for a good Woody Allen flick and this one sounds like a winner! It doesn't come out until the end of December (limited) for the rest of us, but "filmcans" grabbed a look at it while attending the Savannah Film Festival. Enjoy his review!!!
Hi, Harry,
I thought somebody, anybody, might be sending you news from the Savannah Film Fest, but I haven't seen review one on the site so I thought I'd chime in with a word about Woody Allen's new film Match Point, which showed tonight as part of "Director's Choice" night. Now, one would think that "Director's Choice" would mean the film was chosen by a selected director or maybe even the director of the film fest, but no. Instead we get what's essentially "Dreamwork's Executive Choice" night, which just doesn't sound nearly as good. They've been trying to keep the film a secret all week, for some unknown reason, but I had already heard through the grapevine that we were catching the latest Woody Allen film.
Match Point is one of Allen's dramas, but you wouldn't know that from the audience at Savannah's Trustees Theatre tonight. People were laughing at the stupidest little shit, like some Pavlovian response to the name WOODY ALLEN before the title of a movie. Oh, it MUST be funny, right? I'll make sure to titter with giggles whenever people kiss in the rain ro guffaw like a jackass when people are contemplating infidelity. I can't help but wonder how much better the film might have been if I watched it in my own home. One person had to be escorted out he was laughing so hard at inappropriate times. In one scene, a character orders roast chicken. This fucko in the middle of the theatre lets loose with a "HA HA HA HA HA HA!" like it's the funniest shit ever. He got away with doing it for about an hour, but even after he was given boot, people were still giggling like school girls over nothing. Like they'd never seen a drama before.
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers plays Chris Wilton, a tennis instructor with no real motivation in life, who gets involved with the wealthy Hewett family when he starts to give their son, Tom (Matthew Goode), tennis lessons. Wilton hits it of with Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) right away, but even that spark can't compare to the flame that forms when he meets Tom's fiancee. Nola Rice is an American actress struggling to make it in the UK and Scarlett Johansson's natural fuckabilty lends itself of the role of the girl that the lead character would like to fuck. And fuck her he does, in a smoking hot make-out session in a rainy pasture. Nola won't let anything continue past that first encounter, despite Chris's pleading. He resigns himself to the fact that he will never have her again and soon finds himself married to Chloe and starting a family. When he gets the news of Tom and Nola's sudden break-up, he longs for another chance to start something with Nola. She lets him and Nola's passion slowly turns to genuine love. Chris is faced with a dilemma--sit in luxury's lap as a member of the Hewett's and live a boring but stable life or take a chance on a lustful young actress with a string of bad luck and no real prospects?
This isn't the kind of film that grabs you right away. When I saw that it was a drama, I got nervous. I prefer Allen's comedies. When I saw it was about infidelity, I felt like running from my seat and into the lobby. I didn't want to see one more fucking Woody Allen movie about people cheating on each other. I'm glad I stayed, even through the "boring" parts. Those quote-unquote boring parts are important, because this movie builds a nice emotional slow-burn that creeps up on you as the situation between Chris Wilton and Nola Rice gets worse and worse. While never fast-paced, it affords Allen the chance to make the characters three-dimensional, so that when he pulls out some particularly dark surprises in the end, you are in the hot seat with the actors on the screen. Johansson is particularly good in this--all pouty sex-pot at first meeting, but an honest-to-goodness real woman by the end of the film. For those interested, she looks fucking killer in a wet shirt. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is perfectly acceptable playing a character close to Jude Law's in Closer, but his pretty boy looks left me a little cold. Not every motivation he has is explained and it hurts him a little because you don't always understand why he's doing what he's doing. I though at first he might be a con man, because he wouldn't answer any straight questions about his past, but that wasn't the case. He's a bit of a cypher, motivated in part by sex, but also by being able to sit on his ass all day and live like a bazillionaire. In his (and Allen's) favor though, he's not playing Woody Allen, and that's always nice for a change in Allen's films. Brian Cox (with a bad red dye job) and Penelope Wilton round out the cast as the heads of the Hewett family.
This movie goes some places you would never guess, and it helps to prove that Woody Allen is famous for a reason, even while modern cineplex audiences seem to find his work too artsy. We've caught some other great films this week including Good Night, and Good Luck (Straitharn is great), Mrs. Henderson Presents (Hoskins is great), Feast (Beer Guy is great), and my personal fave The Squid and the Whale (wiping semen on the books at your school library is great), but most people I talked to thought that this was the best film so far.
filmcans
