Blue Jasmin - New Woody Allen Film

[Theremin]

Right lads, I'm taking a female woman to see this on Friday.

What am I in for? Rotten Tomatoes seems to like it.

[Thomas]

Presumably this female woman is the 'Blue Jasmin' you speak of, because Woody Allen's new film is called Blue Jasmine.

Not seen it myself, but I'll pipe along opinions that I've read - very good and it's got a bad CGI aeroplane at the beginning.[nb]bit like 9/11 eh lads no not really, of course not really.[/nb]

[Theremin]

What's an 'E' between friends?

[thecuriousorange]

I'm sorry to tell you I saw it last week and hated it.

[up_the_hampipe]

Isn't Louis CK in this?

[Beep Cleep Chimney]

Yes.  And Andrew Dice Clay, oddly.

[up_the_hampipe]

Oh fuck, I thought he was dead.

[Noodle Lizard]

Right lads, I'm taking a female woman to see this on Friday.

What am I in for? Rotten Tomatoes seems to like it.

Rotten Tomatoes also give 'Gravity' 97%, which you'll soon learn is fucking stupid.  Pay them no mind!

But I haven't seen 'Blue Jasmine' yet (might do so today actually, thanks for the reminder).

[Theremin]

Rotten Tomatoes also give 'Gravity' 97%, which you'll soon learn is fucking stupid.  Pay them no mind!

But I haven't seen 'Blue Jasmine' yet (might do so today actually, thanks for the reminder).

No worries!

Also, I was never in danger if seeing Gravity, even on a RT's urging, because I find Sandra Bullock deeply unsettling.

[Mini]

I loved it and agree with all the Cate Blanchett Oscar talk.

[Jerzy Bondov]

The best return to form for Woody Allen since the last one

[WesterlyWinds]

Can I go and see this alone? Will I need a trench coat and/or tissues?

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

If you're planning to masturbate I'd suggest bringing both and some sort of prostate nudging device.

[WesterlyWinds]

Get your mind out of the gutter - it's wet weather gear for the tears I will be crying at such a romantic film that I have attended alone

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Get your mind out of the gutter - it's wet weather gear for the tears I will be crying at such a romantic film that I have attended alone

It's a very depressing and uncomfortable film[nb]People wank on about "cringe comedy" - a devalued term if ever there was one - but Woody absolutely nails it in this. It's quite merciless at times.[/nb]. It didn't make me cry - and I'm someone who's been known to shed a tear at the most cheaply manipulative bullshit - but it certainly made me think twice about having a severe mental breakdown. Sorry, that's awfully glib of me. It's a great film, but it's not a weepy bouquet of heart-stirring romance by any stretch of the imagination.

[ThickAndCreamy]

I thought it was fantastic. It was utterly engrossing and Blanchett did a wonderful job of breaking down every other minute throughout the film. It made me laugh far more times than I imagined it would.

It was an extremely uncomfortable film really, every

Spoiler alert

hint of romance was or became tainted and every dream turned to delusion

[close]

. Jasmin was a wonderful character; so hollow, desperate and self-obsessed. It felt like the right film to come out in the current political climate and Jasmin seemed like the perfect victim.

Strange to see Louis CK in such a big film, although it did seem to work quite well and seeing him 'dressed up' in a dirty old graying suit put a smile on my face.

[Lee Van Cleef]

Agreed with the above comments really, unsettling but really very good. Blanchett is excellent, as is Dice Clay. To be honest I wasn't sure, when I laughed, if I should be laughing, I'm not sure if that's my paranoia or the cleverness of the film.

[Thomas]

When I saw it yesterday, I heard the people next to me laughing at the bits that I thought were pretty gloomy.

Speaking of 'people next to me,' it was satisfying - without wanting to sound patronising or suchlike - to see people from greyer generations shuffling into the cinema, sitting alongside we younger uns. There were a couple of old ladies when I went to see Skyfall, but they didn't half natter.

[Lee Van Cleef]

I saw it today at Cinema City, about 12 people in the screen room, I was the youngest at the ripe old age of 31.

[Noodle Lizard]

I was fairly underwhelmed overall.  As with most of Woody's later stuff (i.e. the past two or three decades, especially the last one), it feels like it's been done before and done better.  Cate Blanchett, obviously, was really good, and was trying really hard with a fairly lacklustre script.  It really was pretty am-dram - like if an A-level drama student was tasked with writing a modernisation of 'A Streetcar Named Desire'.  I was expecting more from Andrew Dice Clay given what you cunts have been saying, but really he was just "not as bad as you'd probably think, but still quite bad". 

There was a point towards the end where I realised I couldn't stand any of the characters and had no sympathy for them, which might have been intentional, but didn't work at all for me.  It can be done, mind, I'm certainly not one to say that you need to root for any particular character, but you have to have something to make you care about them one way or another.

Also, I was a bit shocked at how blandly-made it was.  Granted, Woody's latest films have never had much going on visually save for cinematographic glorification of nice parts of trendy cities, but this one felt quite shoddy in parts - some very dodgy edits jumped out at me, and the eyelines were all over the place during close-up conversations (again, maybe intentional, didn't work for me).

I'm still firmly in the boat of "make less films, but put a lot more effort into them" - it really does show that it took less time to write than it did to shoot, and I don't think it'd be afforded the same leniency without Woody's name on it.  My two pence.

[WesterlyWinds]

There were a couple of old ladies when I went to see Skyfall, but they didn't half natter.

I take solace in the fact that they will be DEAD SOON.

[Maurice Yeatman]

Forum favourite Peter Hitchens gives it two thumbs up.

I can take or leave Woody Allen. He was a bit funny, a long time ago, and all his later films strike me as over-praised and pretentious.
So please believe me when I say that Cate Blanchett's performance in Blue Jasmine (Allen's latest film) is so superlative that it is almost your duty to see it.
The rest of the cast are great, too, but this account of a human being who has fallen off the edge of the moral universe is as close as we can get to Shakespeare in modern drama.
The black truth that lies beneath our flashy modern lives, that the breach of the marriage vow leads all too often to madness and death, has seldom been more graphically shown.

[Thomas]

I'm not sure that 'breaching the marriage vow' is something Woody particularly seeks to condemn, but it's warming to see the film praised by such a variety of characters.[nb]i.e. some Verbwhores and Peter Hitchens.[/nb]

[Mini]

Forum favourite Peter Hitchens gives it two thumbs up.

Now I hate it

[Sam]

Just caught up this.

It was surprisingly mediocre and dull. The dialogue was very clunky, everything felt like a line in a script, the flashbacks were pretty cheesy, and as NL said it's got no visual flair or good direction, just a flat and lifeless feel.

The beginning was particularly bad but things picked up with the scene of the double date in the clam cafe. The characterisation and dialogue of the grease  monkey boyfriend was very good, and I generally enjoyed all the Sally Hawkins stuff (her accent was all over the Atlantic though). Baldwin was his usual slimey self, pretty good.

I liked the creeping realisation that she's responsible for all her crap decisions, that she'd have been a car crash regardless of the affairs or financial stuff. Her delusion was cringing with the occasional pathos. I liked the bleakness, the ending and how little she learned.

Overall pretty drab with the occasional flourish, 3 stars?

[Queneau]

The dialogue was very clunky, everything felt like a line in a script

Why on earth could that be?

[Sam]

Cos he's an inconsistent and often bad writer, with most of his good screenplays behind him.

[the psyche intangible]

Inconsistent bad writer that didn't write a script? No wonder.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Just caught up this.

It was surprisingly mediocre and dull. The dialogue was very clunky, everything felt like a line in a script, the flashbacks were pretty cheesy, and as NL said it's got no visual flair or good direction, just a flat and lifeless feel.

The beginning was particularly bad but things picked up with the scene of the double date in the clam cafe. The characterisation and dialogue of the grease  monkey boyfriend was very good, and I generally enjoyed all the Sally Hawkins stuff (her accent was all over the Atlantic though). Baldwin was his usual slimey self, pretty good.

I liked the creeping realisation that she's responsible for all her crap decisions, that she'd have been a car crash regardless of the affairs or financial stuff. Her delusion was cringing with the occasional pathos. I liked the bleakness, the ending and how little she learned.

Overall pretty drab with the occasional flourish, 3 stars?

I wouldn't be that critical of it, but I was definitely underwhelmed. Perhaps it's because it was sold to me as a comedy (at least by the poster quotes, I never read reviews or watch trailers if I can before seeing a film) but I wasn't expecting it to be such a dramatic affair. And even despite this, I still feel the first thirty minutes or so are a little drab and clunky, which disappointed. I did enjoy it more and more as it went on, and thought Cate Blanchett was superb, but am surprised it's so greatly praised by so many.

It's a shame as I loved Midnight In Paris (though I'm a sucker for a schmaltzy romantic comedy occasionally) and quite a few of his more recent films, but this just didn't quite work for me.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I thought it was quite good, but mostly for Cate Blanchett and Sally Hawkins, although Dice Clay was surprisingly good too.

The one thing I didn't like was that they tried to portray Sally Hawkins as some sort of down and out loser, even though she was living in a very spacious nice apartment in the middle of San Francisco which would cost at least $3500 a month to rent (way beyond the reach of someone who works at a supermarket). In reality she'd probably be living in a rough neighbourhood in Oakland and having to commute every day.