Irrational Man (2015)

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.

Maybe the lesson is that you can't make one movie per year and expect them to be all top notch. Although some will be brilliant, many will flunk, and some others will be massive failures, it's pure statistics. Unfortunately, this one sits strongly in the latter category. Even when he is not at the top of his game, Woody Allen manages to make movies that are entertaining, passable or at least watchable. Not this one. After 95 minutes of the first bars of "The In Crowd" repeated endlessly, it is a relief to get to the end titles. Many other reviewers have already pointed out the paper thin, miscast characters, the non-existent script or the laughable cop-out ending. But it gets worse, this movie fails even at technical aspects, which has usually been one of Woody Allen's strong suits. Awfully lit, badly framed scenes and appalling photography contribute to make this a very sad and painful cinematic experience.One can't fail to notice how Woody's stories have evolved over the course of his directing career from being set in working class Brooklyn to the ultra-rich one percenters in The Hamptons or Martha's Vineyard. Not that there's anything wrong with that, in fact, that is probably the trajectory that Woody Allen's life itself has followed. The problem is that while his previous characters were usually quite likable quirky simpletons or neurotic intellectuals, they have now become unbearably spoiled, cartoonish, vacuous and pretentious ivy leaguers. Who can possibly like, or even feel the slightest interest for such despicable people? I would like to emphasize that this has nothing to do with their affluent lifestyle; you can make strong, interesting characters out of billionaires. The Great Gatsby being a case in point. Will still watch a Woody Allen movie over a blockbuster any day, and I hope he continues making them for many years. But Irrational Man was a terrible misfire which does him no honor - skip it and you will be missing nothing.

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.

I have always enjoyed the classic (and dare I say "original") Woody Allen movies that he produced in his early career. Over the years, they have become a series of hit-and-miss films whose only claim to fame is its director and the all-star cast he still manages to attract. I haven't heard of most of them, but when I stumble across one on Netflix, I know it's an Allen movie the moment one of the characters begins to speak.I don't understand how Allen manages to take a very disparate group of actors with different styles and techniques and somehow make them all sound the same. I call it the "Wooden Allen Method" (or "Syndrome", in the cases of the actors who appear in more than one of his films.) All of his actors become infected with an inauthentic, earnest intellectualism and speak their lines with the same stuttering, sighing angst. There have been exceptions, of course, as in the case of Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine, but in general every Allen ingenue sounds like every other ingenue, and every world-weary professor/huckster sounds the same, and the ingenues and professors always seem to end up "falling in love" and into bed together. Spare me. It is such a transparent conceit of a man past his prime to think that every gifted, beautiful young woman is frothing at the bit to bed his pot-bellied, greasy-haired self. The love stories in Allen films are rarely convincing, and weaken the overall trajectory of the movie. Let's all pause for a few moments and watch while a Beautiful Young Thing rolls around in ecstasy with a Withered Old Thing.The one sparkling exception however, was Parker Posey whose natural energy, and ebullience informed her small role with realism and humanity. I would love to see more of her in films that showcase her intelligence, wit and vivacity. She is maturing into a very fine actress.Overall, it's an alright movie; a passing indulgence of a long winter's eve. The location is beautiful, the story is interesting, and production value is sound.