Posted on 09/07/2013 9:07:11 PM PDT by qwertyz
There’s a lot eating Cate Blanchett in “Blue Jasmine,” a brilliant social satire about morals, social class and a socialite coming spectacularly undone in our ethics-challenged times, and she should already start clearing space on her mantle for all the golden statuettes that are going to be coming to her.
The latest cinematic effort from writer/director Woody Allen is the perfect antidote from the usual superhero spectacles and it's a stand up and cheer return to form for a celebrated director that has fallen on hard times himself.
(Excerpt) Read more at richmond.com ...
Thanks.
He just raised her like his daughter...
Are you sure? Woody and Mia never lived together, and Soon-Yi said she always considered Andre Previn to be her father.
I don’t know what to say about Dylan. Farrow only seemed to notice abuse after Allen started a relationship with her oldest daughter. Was it true or revenge? And with her history of supporting convicted child rapists it makes it even murkier.
21 is under aged?
Mia Farrows’s other adopted daughter Dylan claimed Woody Allen also sexually molested her when she was 7 years old.
Whatever happened to that allegation?
>”He’s deliberately teaching despair, and very carefully lying to do it”<
Who does Woody think he is, Obama?
Interesting. I didn’t read any reviews that mentioned the Mia Jasmine connection. But I see what you mean.
Woody Allen is a pedophile and manhattan was him hinting at it to the world. He is attracted to girls who are past puberty but under the age of consent, and apparently follows through. In Manhattan, I believe (it’s been years), he comes home and a young teen girl wearing a woody Allen t shirt is hiding in his bedroom. When he discovers her, she indicates she wants to seep with him. He shrugs, and turns out the light — a symbol of sex in the movies for many decades. He also has a 17 year old high school student girlfriend, while his friends are all dating adult women.
He did go against taboo by sleeping with and taking nude photos of, his long time girlfriend’s underage daughter. There is no world in which that is correct or decent behavior. Men sleeping with young teens is wrong. Men sleeping with their girlfriend’s underage child is always dead wrong. Sick.
Then he was witnessed by housekeepers etc spending way too much intense alone time cuddled up with Mia’s 7 year old daughter. Ignoring his own son with her and constantly trying to “woo” this little girl. Including some inappropriate touching.
He was not allowed to be alone with is own son for a long time.
His movie may be fantastic. I swore I’d never watch another WA movie again, but one night I saw a movie in the middle on TV and got caught up and adored it. Found out afterward, it was Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen. I watched it again from the beginning. He can really make good movies. But he’s another scumbag like Polanski, who also can make good films.
"So it makes sense that this film feels like a return to form of his great films of the 80s, because that's when he was married to Farrow."
Why do people always think they were married? They never lived together.
I think the courts didn't believe Farrow or the housekeeper. If they did I'd think Allen would be in jail.
It's also wrong to support Roman Polanski. But Farrow did/does. If she's so horrified by pedophiles why does she still support him?
From the article in your link:
“Calling attention to someone’s birthday-party behavior may seem trivial at best. However, Dr. Coates, who just happened to be in Mia’s apartment to work with one of her other children, had only to witness a brief greeting between Woody and Dylan before she began a discussion with Mia that resulted in Woody’s agreeing to address the issue through counseling. At that point Coates didn’t know that, according to several sources, Woody, wearing just underwear, would take Dylan to bed with him and entwine his body around hers; or that he would have her suck his thumb; or that often when Dylan went over to his apartment he would head straight for the bedroom with her so that they could get into bed and play. He called Mia a “spoilsport” when she objected to what she referred to as “wooing.” Mia has told people that he said that her concerns were her own sickness, and that he was just being warm. For a long time, Mia backed down. Her love for Woody had always been mixed with fear. He could reduce her to a pulp when he gave vent to his temper, but she was also in awe of him, because he always presented himself as “a morally superior person.”
“One summer day in Connecticut, when Dylan was four and Woody was applying suntan lotion to her nude body, he alarmed Mia’s mother, actress Maureen O’Sullivan, and sister Tisa Farrow when he began rubbing his finger in the crack between her buttocks. Mia grabbed the lotion out of his hand, and O’Sullivan asked, “How do you want to be remembered by your children?” “As a good father,” Woody answered. “Well, that’s interesting,” O’Sullivan replied. “It only lasted a few seconds, but it was definitely weird,” says Tisa Farrow.”
Yeah. He is a pedophile. I know a pedo principal on trial for molestation for just that, the touching the crack of a girl’s butt. He is sick.
re: “ He’s deliberately teaching despair, and very carefully lying to do it. He’s evil.”
Woody is a lost, lost sinner. We’ve ALL sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All of us are evil in that sense.
Woody Allen is as lost as a goose. Though he seems to know innately that the problem of evil is within man himself, he just shrugs and walks away from the solution. I don’t know if he is any more evil than anyone else though.
If there is no God, as Woody intimates, then he is exactly correct to despair, because then he has accurately pointed out that there is no meaning, no transcendent foundation for morality. He gets that. He seems to acknowledge the despair, but doesn’t want to embrace the despair, he just goes on doing his thing.
He rejects Christianity because it’s not sophisticated enough, or he thinks those that do accept it aren’t sophisticated enough, I’m not sure which. I just wish he would truly look at the claims of Christ and quit his superficial straw-man objections.
But, as it says in John 1, “men preferred the darkness rather than the light.” It’s probably no more complicated than that.
A case of life imitating art, or vice versa.
Go back and watch Love and Death again. Allen's character, facing an existential crisi, goes to see his priest. 'What is the meaning of life?' He asks.
'Sixteen-year old girls... Preferably two of them' the priest answers.
Another bit of foreshadowing...
I have my doubts. Woody Allen is the guintessential ‘relativist.’
I did too.....If you do, come back and leave a review that's easier to understand than in Post #1.......LOL!
The question, of course, is what exactly is Woody Allen imitating?
In his "Shadows and Fog" the Clown says, "We're not like other people, we're artists." I think this is part of Allen's delusion. This idea of being above the great masses of the unwashed runs through Allen's work.
In "Bullets over Broadway", he mentions several times that, "The artist tends to create his own moral universe". This is modern relativism run amuck, to the point where one day it's perfectly ok to fondle 7 year olds. Narcissism meets relativism.
I had been boycotting Allen’s films for many years out of disgust with him, but went to see this recently. It is indeed a great movie - mostly because of Blanchett’s performance - if she doesn’t win an Oscar for it I’ll be very surprised. And not a bad comment on how dangerous it is to base your sense of self on things - in the end the main character’s life has no meaning and she has no self.
Absolutely correct. You see this in Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway and other post-modern writers: in the absence of religious faith, the art is constructed as an alternative to despair. The artist is his own god, the creative force in his own universe.
We might all agree with Allen that a life based in material things to be vacuous, but his solution is ultimately solipsistic.
“Suck out the poison!”
Yes, it sort of does, and Allen doesn’t leave himself off the hook.
Warning: bit of a SPOILER here.
Hal, the fake rich husband, has a number of affairs. When those are revealed, he tells Jasmine he wants a divorce because he’s really “in love” with a 17-year-old French au pair girl. Jasmine knows he’s been lying about everything. The revelation of this fantasy sends her over the edge. It’s the first time, but not the last, that she says “I’ve got to get out of here.” But what could be a cleansing turn toward truth and God for Jasmine, in a word, repentance, is a turn toward delusional remorse.
Allen’s artistic sense is better than his personal moral sense. This au pair fantasy is the bubble of wealth, success, and respectability that breaks everything — just like the Soon-Yi scandal justifiably popped Allen’s world, although not Allen’s self-constructed narrative about the scandal.
“What’s the scandal?” Allen said about marrying his stepdaughter. Gee, Woody, read the Post article (http://nypost.com/2012/01/08/the-quiet-victory-of-mia-the-kids-woody-left-behind/). For 20 years, Allen has been living inside a self-constructed moral bubble about Soon Yi. At least his artistic conscience is screaming about it, even if his moral conscience continues whistling in the dark.
(The alienation of Allen’s/Jasmine’s son is also referenced in the movie. Woody’s mind will dig up ANYTHING to serve his art, which is either a moral failing or a path back to goodness and God, who knows?)
Another caution: This is a psychologically and morally troubling movie. While I think it’s a great one, the conclusion is disturbing and nihilistic — a Christian context of confession and repentance versus remorse and despair helps a lot in “enjoying” this movie. Like I said, it’s moral poetry, not a Hollywood production.
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