Really Surprised!

Masterful Movie

Let's be realistic.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

SPOILER: I thought the Abe character played by Joaquin Phoenix was fairly interesting, as well as Parker Posey's. The academic setting in beautiful Newport was nice to look at- but what began as an interesting relationship between Jill (Emma Stone) and Joaquin takes a mean turn. I started to hate Emma's character--she was mean to her boyfriend before dumping him for Abe, then becomes morally outraged when she finds out Abe killed a dishonest judge whom Jill hated for making life miserable for this woman whose conversation they over heard at a diner. I wanted both Abe and Jill to go down that elevator shaft. A total bummer of an ending.

Student at Rhode Island university falls for her philosophy professor, a burnt-out, hard-drinking older man with a pot belly and a reputation for sleeping with his students. He initially hopes to keep their relationship casual, that is until the thought of doing society a favor--eliminating someone with a worse reputation than his--comes to mind, which brightens his outlook and gives him the impetus to date and enjoy life for the first time. Fine Woody Allen drama, well-acted yet rife with the writer-director's familiar crimes-and-misdemeanors (with a tip of the hat to Dostoevsky). The teacher-student affair is another Allen-trademark, though Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone are subtly charismatic in these roles. Still, nothing much seems to happen in the first 45 minutes (Allen takes too much time kick-starting the plot) and the general cast of characters here is very small. Allen uses a jazzy rendition of "The 'In' Crowd" as a music motif, and doesn't rely too much on sex or sex talk to spark his narrative, though one does become impatient with Phoenix's teacher, who justifies his actions again and again--first in a voice-over and then to Stone, for whom his feelings are never really made clear. **1/2 from ****

Woody, once again, seems to be in a comfort area, which we are all tired of. We have seen, with this time, three times the same movie. At the end, the only reflection one can make is that he is making of himself a cliché, from every point of view. I will disagree to call this sequences a Trilogy or something similar, but a creative stagnation. With Match Point we watch a dramatic and delicate movie that evokes directly Dostoievski's Crime and Punishment, being a bit dangerous since Dostoievski is an overused topic to make things look more obscure and deeper. We had a second experience on screen about the same topic with Cassandraá Dream, without any additional or richer analytical purpose. The fresh air came with a comedy that focuses on the good side of the story, not anymore on the disturbed mind. Still, everything started to be boring since then. Now, we had with Irrational Man, a very good cast on screen, however any new inflection. He is becoming in a suffocating agent. I have to admit that Blue Jasmin and You Will Meet a Talk Dark Stranger were enjoyable since empathy attacks immediately the audience with this pathetic, bizarre and intimate protagonist. That could be an interesting narrative line to follow for Allen, so we still could believe that his sense of humor is accurate and binding, without dropping himself into this "philosophical lucubrations".

The plot is highly relatable to Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" and "Rope". I hope that you can get the references, for it's funny once you realize that.Of course, it comes with the already expected woodyallenien soundtrack, background philosophy theories and, as if there could be a Woody Allen's without it, charm. It's ironic and morally intriguing. The great thinkers's thoughts laid all through the film are a nice presence.It's worth your time to watch, but don't expect much. It's not one of the director's gems.