In Contention

Tag: Match Point

  • Could Woody Allen be a surprise Best Director nominee?

    Woody Allen at the 2002 Academy AwardsIn 1994, Woody Allen’s masterful “Bullets Over Broadway” was not really on anyone’s charts as a potential Oscar nominee. A very funny film about a playwright who enlists a gangster to help him bring life and reality to his play, it was one of Allen’s best works with hysterically funny performances from John Cusack, the great Dianne Wiest (who won an Oscar), Chazz Palminteri, Jennifer Tilly, Jack Warden, Mary Louise Parker, Rob Reiner, Jim Broadbent, and Tracey Ullman. The film premiered here at the Toronto International Film Festival with excellent reviews, but it seemed overshadowed that season by Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” without question the movie of the year.

    The day the Academy Award nominations were announced, as expected, “Forrest Gump” and “Pulp Fiction” dominated, but in a huge surprise, Allen’s film was up in seven categories including Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Palminteri), Best Supporting Actress (Weist and Tilly) and a couple of technical awards.

    I have always believed the film to be one of Allen’s funniest and finest films, with beautifully created characters and knockout performances throughout. Wiest is miraculous as a manipulative diva seducing the director/writer portrayed by Cusack because she knows it to be the only way to create a better character for herself. Her “don’t speak” becomes more and more insane throughout the film.

    I have always felt the film was robbed of a Best Picture nomination, likely edged out by “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” but it really did not matter as “Forrest Gump would dominate the ceremony.

    This year, Allen has directed and written a critically acclaimed film in “Vicky Christina Barcelona,” with a powerhouse performance from Penélope Cruz (the Oscar frontrunner), and solid work from Javier Bardem, Rebecca Hall, and Scarlett Johansson (two of them Golden Globe nominees). The film is funny, sexy and dangerous, both vintage Allen, but also a newer, darker Allen, a director evolving.

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  • REVIEW: “Match Point” (**1/2)

    Match PointThe problem with Woody Allen’s most recent effort, the multi-lauded Cannes favorite “Match Point” is that we’ve seen it all before. The writer/director has approached the exact same territory before albeit on this side of the pond.

    But deeper than that, it seems the extremely positive critical reception has more to do with a longing for the “return to form” we’ve come to expect – or should I say pine for – with each and every new endeavor from the conceiver of such creative works of genius as “Annie Hall” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”

    What “Match Point” lacks inherently, however, is just that – creativity.

    One comes to appreciate the cutely conceived, tight little package of a story (fit with hooks and paradigms the level of Syd Field), but what the master filmmakers do in instances such as these is elevate the material that extra inch with a depth of character, a richness of interaction. Who better to offer such aspects than Woody Allen?

    Instead, however, while the audience is set off on the interesting ride that unfolds beat after beat, a disinterest in the people actually living the events in the story keeps one at an uncomfortable observer’s distance.

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