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| bartist |
 Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 8:46 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6961
Location: Black Hills
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marantzo wrote: ....I think it was realistic when she called the cops. She was furious and crazed by what her husband told her. She was out of control, not something that was unusual for someone like her. She wanted to punish her husband as strongly as possible, completely clueless about what it would do to her. Let's face it, she was unbalanced!
You make a case for that scene, Gary. Maybe that aura of cold fierce intelligence that Jeremy mentions was part of why I didn't quite believe it. For some reason, I was trying to picture Kate Winslet in the role, but that didn't work either, as she doesn't have that long-boned trophy wife physique that seemed called for here. |
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| knox |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 10:41 am |
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Joined: 18 Mar 2010
Posts: 1246
Location: St. Louis
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I liked everything about Blue Jasmine except for the tall crazy woman. I thought it was the absolute worst performance of Blanchett's otherwise illustrious career.
Interesting movie, though....has generate quite the spectrum of opinion here and elsewhere.
I'm going to give Closed Circuit a try, but I'm a little wary of Eric Bana in this. |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 4:46 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 3784
Location: AZ
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What a swinging pendulum of views here!
Adding mine: I thought Blue Jasmine was totally Cate B's movie. I didn't think it was entertainment or typical Woody humor. To me it was an anguished case study. Stella/Jasmine's pain was real. I suffered with her. As far as Dwight was concerned it would have made more sense if he was a con man (remember when he played opposite Carrie who was in The Great Gatsby.....me losing more memory cells....? I can't imagine a successful man falling so easily for a woman because she wears Chanel.
My bet is that Woody is aware of reality tv. Jasmine could be on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. In fact the woman who played Alec B.s trainer is Ali Fedatowski...a former Bachelorette!
Sally H. created a nice balance because she was like able and mostly happy.
As far as the dentist was concerned realistically......my own dentist who is young, overweight, and smart and skilled lost a sexual harassment suit of a former assistant.
Other women outside the theater also thought it was an emotionally exhausting experience. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 5:40 pm |
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Betsy, I don't disagree with anything in your review. Well. maybe the Dwight thing. He was a nice guy and lonely since his wife died. He saw her at the party and he was taken with her. She screwed everything up by lying to him, of course.
The final scene of the movie was a knockout. Cate B was so authentic, that if you only saw that scene and didn't know it was acting, you would think, "Boy, that poor woman is loony!" |
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| Befade |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 5:58 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: AZ
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| She was authentic, Gary and maybe being a woman I felt her pain not her looney. Dwight...falling for her, okay, but rushing to get married? |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 6:10 pm |
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Befade wrote: She was authentic, Gary and maybe being a woman I felt her pain not her looney. Dwight...falling for her, okay, but rushing to get married?
In my opinion, he was lonely and wanted a wife in his life. For him Jasmine seemed a God-sent.
I sympathized with her also, but she was very difficult in a lot of ways because of her mental problem. Her (sort of) sister was very tolerant with her and she was sort of the flip side of Jasmine. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 6:21 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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Befade wrote: Stella/Jasmine's pain was real.
Jasmine was "Blanche." "Stella" was Ginger, the Sally Hawkins character. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 6:32 pm |
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"...I felt her pain not her looney..."
That's why I had the quote, "...that poor woman is looney." Sympathetic.
Anyway, you and I have very similar views of Blue Jasmine. |
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| inlareviewer |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 7:03 pm |
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Joined: 05 Jul 2004
Posts: 1949
Location: Lawrence, KS
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| Deleted |
Last edited by inlareviewer on Sat Aug 31, 2013 2:48 am; edited 3 times in total
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 8:11 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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Befade wrote: She was authentic, Gary and maybe being a woman I felt her pain not her looney. Dwight...falling for her, okay, but rushing to get married?
I felt her pain more than her lunacy as well (the step-son's cruelty to her in the record shop particularly killed me). I felt the lunacy angle was so incredibly stupid. We know why Blanche goes insane, and I think we basically believe it. Even there, I think Williams is a bit melodramatic--it's not the finest aspect of Streetcar but at l think we get his basic point that people either become strong enough to be dominating monsters like Stanley or weak, broken people who succumb to their illusions like Blanche. It fits he thesis, as it were.
But Jasmine's insanity is just a showy "dramatic" affectation in Allen's script. There's no reason for her to hallucinating the past and talking to thin air except Allen thinks it's powerful. One of the many serious missteps in his script. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 9:59 pm |
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I guess you don't know much about what mental illness can actually create. Jasmine's activities and fantasies etc. are certainly caused by her mental disorder. Nothing unbelievable about that.
Allen was correct. It was powerful. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Sat Aug 31, 2013 1:30 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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| It doesn't come from anything depicted in the script. Nor is it clear how she got the Xanax proscription but has somehow kept her deteriorating condition from whatever psychiatrist is prescribing the pills (whoever that would be, since we never see anyone). Allen is clearly using mental illness not for documentary purposes ("such people...exist" dum dum DUM!) but as a metaphor for her approach to life. But he doesn't connect the metaphor realistically enough to the situation. He hasn't Williams' gift for merging poetry and realism. She probably ends up homeless, and you can argue that homeless people really exist so that's an okay plot development, but it isn't really believable in the context of the world created in the film. Generally, a real artist accomplishes that. |
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| gromit |
| Posted: Sat Aug 31, 2013 5:01 am |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9016
Location: Shanghai
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The semi-recent Pablo (2012) is an okay doc. Mostly a lot of older famous folks talking about what a great guy Pablo Ferro was. And there's a fair bit of animation of Pablo in his young days, with voiceover narration by Jeff Bridges.
It seems Pablo was among the first to use rapid editing in trailers, and then in Bullit used multi-split screens. So his work was innovative and pre-figured a good deal of the MTV quick editing age. I would have liked to have gotten the full trailers, either in the film or as extras. Maybe licensing issues, but you'd think studios would be happy to have a documentary promoting trailers for their back catalog. I wish there were more about the art of trailers or how he worked, instead of the more surface celebration of what a cool eccentric good old Pablo is/was.
Pablo himself was close friends with Hal Ashby, did the famous trailer and opening credit sequence for Dr. Strangelove, was involved with tons of other well-known films, and lived a pretty bohemian sex drugs & creativity lifestyle first in The East Village (where one day he answered the door circa 1970 and got shot in the neck) and later in Malibu.
It annoyed me how many of his friends/celebs pronounced Pablo much like pablum, with the very American nasal A, instead of a soft Spanish aaah sound. Pablo was from Cuba, which gets pronounced Cooba each time. A weird linguistic inconsistency.
The doc is entirely okay, with some curious fluffery, but is mostly the kind of film you can catch any random 15 or 20 minutes of on cable and feel like you got the whole thing. |
Last edited by gromit on Sun Sep 01, 2013 3:30 am; edited 1 time in total
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| Befade |
| Posted: Sat Aug 31, 2013 1:50 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 3784
Location: AZ
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Joe...I'm very familiar with all of Tennessee Williams women. I actually thought Blanche was more hystrianic and harder to relate to than Jasmine. Jasmine is afloat...her anchor..Alec...was an illusion. She's been stripped...someone who depended on money and class is stuck with a sister who's from a different world. Women depending on men for security are legion. Jasmine does not know how to cope in the real world...Chanel is not armor. Her anxiety is palpable.
Billy...I need a few new brain cells.....they've just made a discovery about this with mice......I'm waiting for the pill. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sat Aug 31, 2013 4:49 pm |
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| Just saw The Butler. Good movie. |
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