Blue Jasmine

Just got back from Woody Allen’s new film, Blue Jasmine.  I  would divide Woody Allen’s stuff into 3 categories.  The early stuff, like Take The Money and Run up to Annie Hall or maybe a couple films after that, when he was still in all of his own films and it was still funny.

Bitch, Basket case, or both?

Then, there are his later films, where he just writes and directs and lets professional good looking people populate them, as god intended, and they can be pretty great, too.

Then there was all that shit in the middle.

Anyway, even though it was basically about a woman who cried through the whole thing because her life was so messed up, I liked it.  You kind of had to sympathize with her, even though she was a total bitch who’d treated her sister like dirt when she had the multi-millionaire husband and the place on Park Avenue, but then you kind of stopped sympathizing with her when she continued to treat her sister like dirt even though now she was dependent on her sister for a place to stay, and then you realized she was kind of nuts and tended to drift off into hallucinations of her glorious past, before her husband had been sent to prison and committed suicide, while she was standing on the street corner, and you sympathized with her again.

Then she whined about any job anybody suggested for her, and she kept bitching at her sister’s boyfriend about what a loser he was for not being a millionaire, and you hated her again, but then she really tried to make it in her computer classes and that boring job as the dentist’s receptionist and so you sympathized with her again, especially after the creepy dentist hit on her quite creepily, although she could have handled it better and I half expected it to go the other way, that she’d wind up with the dentist.

Then she dragged her sister to that party where everybody was just as money and status conscious as she was and met her soul-mate of shallow, the rich guy wannabe entitled politician, and I totally hated her by that point, and hated her more for messing up her sister’s relationship, but I hated him even more than that so I was actually happy when he found out all the nasty secrets about her past and figured maybe she’d be better off without him and it would be a happy ending after all, but it wasn’t so much.  Not for her, anyway.

Moral of the story:  Money makes you miserable, but mostly after you lose it all.

Worth seeing.  Original.  I’d rank it up there with Match Point or Vicki Cristina Barcelona.