Notable Omission from the Sci-Fi Superfan Reference Guide.
TV There's clearly something missing from this Sci-Fi Superfan Reference Guide:
Hardly The Completely Useless Encyclopedia or Tachyon TV, but it'll do.
Monikor: Whovians (though has that truly been used in the past twenty years?)
They like their sci-fi: British.
Proudest Moment: 2005.
Lamest Moment:
Old Who:
Nu Who:
"Not you too Bob."
When Fandom Goes Too Far: The Ianto Jones Shrine.
If You Marry One Expect: A house full of spin-off books, comics, cds and dvds arranged in chronological story order.
How To Piss One Off: Tell them that you like all the kissing.
Sex Role Playing Will Involve: A Sonic Screwdriver.
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)
Then Milestone time. Manhattan Murder Mystery was the first Woody Allen film I saw at the cinema. At, I discovered on opening the dvd box, screen six of the Manchester Odeon on Oxford Road on the 4th February 1994 at 1:10 pm. I still have the ticket:
Look at that old logo. Look at the price! Well, they do say “Please retain this portion”. The anomalous aspect of this is that I don’t remember being in Manchester on that day. I was at university in Leeds. I did go and see my old school friend Richard who was at UMIST at some time during that year and this was a Friday so it’s entirely possible that I went to the cinema whilst I waited for him to finish lectures for the day. Unless we attended the Odeon together. Or this was a different weekend entirely. My mind is blank.
I do remember the second time, which was a week later at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds. At the time I was a volunteer at the Studio Theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University and met the director on the way there, so just like the couples going to see Double Indemnity in the film, we went together. It was a house packed with students, certainly busier than any house for a Woody Allen film I’ve experienced since, and everyone enjoyed themselves, laughing all of the way through which is how it should. Perhaps the Odeon had been empty and that’s why it didn’t stick in my memory.
Like Annie Hall, it’s a film which is even funnier now than then because I too have grown some experiences. Having since watched most of the films referenced, I can now laugh along to the Last Year At Marienbad discussion, Double Indemnity and the use of The Lady from Shanghai at the conclusion, of life imitating art.
Now Diane Keaton, how I’ve missed you. With the exception of her sparkling cameo in Radio Days, this was her first film with Woody since 1979’s Manhattan and yet, despite having added some age and having worked with Charles Shyer in the intervening years, so easily does she fit back into his style it’s like she’s never been away. Her part was originally written for Mia and hardly changed but since the film is based on an excised section of Annie Hall, it's fitting that she should be the one to step in, making Manhattan Murder Mystery a kind of alternate reality sequel suggesting what might have happened if Alvy and Annie had stayed together, though without any of the post-modern tricks.
I’d be interested to know how mystery genre fans approach the film; I’m terrible with anything written by Christie or Doyle, never able to work out who the killer will be from the clues being laid out working from hunches always. But Murder is really a how done it; Carol knows who the killer is from the off – she’s trying to prove that he has done something nefarious and how he did it which gives it a different complexion and as Roger Ebert notes in his review (video below) most of the clues fall in their lap (incidentally the clip also includes an outrageous spoiler!).
The visual and improvisational style of Husbands and Wives continues here. As the camera darts about the audience is kept on a constant state of awareness as we’re forever wanting to see what’s happening off screen. There’s also an interesting shot as the Liptons are leaving their apartment building were he’s complimenting her on what she’s wearing and it looks like the actors are out of character getting ready to enter the scene and he’s left it in. Many of the scenes play out across very long takes but only now and then are you aware of the actors going on and off script. There are a couple of moments when the camera is off Woody and following Diane about their apartment when a joke seems like it’s been inserted in post-production but it’s largely seamless.
So at a time when you might assume Woody would be winding down his ambition especially as his budget’s shorten he’s still experimenting. To an extent by then he’d become Teflon coated. His films always made a loss at the cinema yet it was almost as though Hollywood couldn’t live with itself if Woody Allen wasn’t allowed to continue making films to entertain them. After two films with Columbia/Tri-Star, he’d spend the rest of the decade working for the Weinsteins at Miramax.
The reason seems to be consistency. Woody, at least until this point hadn’t made a particularly bad film. September and Another Woman were slightly ponderous, but all of them were at least interesting and didn’t fall into the realms of cliché. I still think that’s probably true, but as one of his characters might say, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Husbands and Wives (1992)
Then When we first moved to Sefton Park in 1991, it wasn’t long before we’d found the local video shop, Gerrard's on Aigburth Road. It was convenient, cheap, and since it was also a newsagent you could buy a newspaper whilst borrowing your copy of Husbands and Wives. It’s the place were I hired all of the Star Trek I watched over an extended period and the shop is still there; the VHS gave way to DVD, but it’s still battling along against Lovefilm and Blockbuster. Here it is on Google Street View:
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Now Before we talk about the things you’re supposed to talk about in relation to Husbands and Wives, I wanted to mention the fairly huge, inadvertent mental derail early in the film. It’s from during one of Woody’s confessional moments and if you know anything about British politics …
PROF. GABRIEL ‘GABE’ ROTH:
But, once—
One time, many years ago...
...I was living with this fabulous, interesting woman...
...named Harriet Harmon.
I'm ashamed to say this, but Harriet Harmon...
...was the great love of my life.
It was a very passionate relationship. I loved her very intensely.
And, you know, we just made love everywhere.
She was sexually carnivorous.
We did it in stalled elevators...
...and in bushes and people's houses, at parties in the bathroom.
In the back of cars, she'd put a coat on our laps...
...and grab my hand and stick it between her legs.
She was really something.
And she, you know, she was highly libidinous.
You know? She wanted to make love with other women.
She got into dope for a while. She'd break that thing...
...that you sniff when she'd have her orgasm.
I was getting a real education.
I was fascinated. I was absolutely nuts about her.
And ultimately she wound up in an institution.
I mean, it's not funny, it was a very sad thing.
She was great, but nuts.
We see Harriet. She’s played by the wonderfully named Galaxy Craze and has something of the Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction about her. But it doesn’t really help. Once you’ve heard the name, this Harriet permiates your brain, everything else Gabe has to say about their relationship is unintentionally funny.
Theoretically the last of his tent pole relationship dramas and some have said the last of his truly great films (though of course I’d disagree) Husbands and Wives is more famous for what was occurring behind the scenes in the private lives of Mia and Woody. The gossip, tittle-tattle, whys and wherefores are covered in this admittedly rather good contemporary Entertainment Weekly cover story which sets out the basics and highlights the synchronicities.
If the story had broken now, in this TMZ/Perez Hilton/Twitter media-saturated gossip environment, I can’t imagine Woody’s career would have continued in the same way, since people these days seem to believe the first thing they read, no matter what proper facts are revealed to be further down the line. The original rumour as reported in at EW article is shocking; the truth simply sounds like the plot of a Woody Allen film, almost this one in fact. Nevertheless, I do know people who say they hate his films because they still believe he’s, um, King of the Glitterland. Oh, the arguments.
Husbands and Wives isn’t an easy film to love yet I’ll spend a few more paragraphs than usual explaining why I do. There’s nothing especially original about these stories. Like September or Interiors, this is just a middle class soap opera. Although there are funny moments, there’s plenty of polite and not so polite cruelty in abeyance as the main characters emotionally slam into each other, melodramatically failing to comprehend that it’s their own self-centred selfishness and self-destructive personalities which are stopping them from having a quiet, happy life. Only when a storm comes and literally cools them off do they realise that it’s thought not action which is required, generosity of spirit and modicum of understanding.
It’s also oddly structured. The confessionals suggest a kind of faux-documentary but the rest of the film is very much from the third person. When lawyer series This Life employed a similar trick of having its characters comment on the action, it made very clear that they were addressing a psychologist and not breaking the fourth wall. But like the later French romance Une liaison pornographique which accesses the same device (and the voiceovers in Hannah and Her Sisters), you accept it as the narrative trick that allows us a way into the psychology of the characters or arbitrarily close off the stories at the end. We don’t ask who Harry and Sally (and all of the other characters) are supposed to be talking to at the close of that film.
Carlo Di Palma’s frenetic photography, which also suggests documentary, mirrors the emotional wretching. Woody disingenuously says that he wanted to make a film which was about content over style, but in playing everything in long takes and shooting with handheld cameras he gives the film very particularly style. At one stage, the characters are captured on a street corner through the window of a taxi passing them at high speed. The opening five minute scene in which the camera careens about the tiny apartment attempting to capture all of the important action and acting is far cry from the carefully composed shots of Shadows & Fog but still, it’s a stylistic choice and seems more so as the film progresses and the camera slows down and is almost locked off by the end.
I remember seeing a review of the film with Barry Norman at the time of release and he was obsessed with this camera work, concerned that it might cause sea sickness in the audience. Now, especially on television, it’s become something of a cliché, turning up in sitcom and drama. Even history documentaries or Panarama look like the cameraman purposefully had a pint or two before shooting began to just get the right look. Except in most cases, while they might think that crashing the camera across David Starkey or Jeremy Vine’s face makes the programme visually interesting, its really just a distraction. In the best dramas, like Husbands and Wives, this kind of hand-held camera work should reflect the characters or aid the storytelling.
Judy Davis is a force of nature, her fiery eyes bursting from a pallid face that suggests Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The storm at the close of the film is supposed to mirror the angry moment when she discovers that her husband has moved in with the other woman. Lyssette Anthony is a similar revelation, especially considering this was rush released the same year as her appearance as Miss Scarlett in the ITV gameshow version of Cluedo (alongside Tom Baker as Professor Plum!). There aren’t many actresses who can convincingly fulfil the brief of playing a character who is supposed to be academically inclined and yet also totally vacuous as does here. Liam Neason also appears, relatively early in his career at a time when he was otherwise still playing characters called “Man” and Juliette Lewis in the period just after Cape Fear when she was the hottest young actress in Hollywood.
But this is also, of course, for obvious reasons, Mia’s final film with Woody. I don’t agree with Spignesi that you can identify what was shot before and after the unfortunate incident. Her character is supposed to be emotionally drawn in the places when she looks like she hasn’t slept, so I think, perhaps naively, that it’s more likely a job of acting. But it seems fitting, if ironic, that she would close this decade long collaboration playing a wife who separates from her husband who happens to be played by Woody. As I said the other day, having originally watched the films in isolation I’d thought that Mia’s performances were roughly the same. What I’ve discovered is that she is an actress of surprising range, from gangster moll to cocktail waitress. Luckily, for reasons that will become apparent, Husbands and Wives won’t be the last time I’ll be seeing her in action.
miniblog archive
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Shadows and Fog (1991)
Then By 1997 I was down on my luck. I’d graduated from university the year before and, with the exception of three torturous weeks at HMV had enjoyed over twelve months of stunning unemployment. Eventually I was looking for any work and found myself travelling out to West Kirby for an interview at a job centre to work at the job centre. It was one of the quickest interviews of my life. The employer just seemed to ask me my name, where I was from, what my degree had been and that was that. If I hadn’t had to wait twenty minutes before being seated I would have been in and out in five. Outside was the weekly street market and its here that I bought an ex-rental copy of Shadows and Fog.
Now When I was much younger, before my Dad retired, he was the key-holder for the business where he worked. Sometimes if the burglar alarm malfunctioned or if a robber had genuinely attempted to break into the place, he’d be woken up by the police in the middle of the night and have to go down there to turn the cacophony off. I’d sometimes go along to keep him company and we’d find ourselves standing in a Liverpool side street at three o’clock in the morning.
This was quite some time before the concept of twenty-four cities had become currency so the area was deserted and only illuminated by the odd street light. The city at the time of night was an unreal, artificial place, almost like I imagined a film set must be without the people, the hustle and bustle. Every change in light source would seem significant, every noise surprising and not a little bit frightening. I usually wondered what kind of support I was offering as I yelped with fear.
That’s precisely the atmosphere, Woody succeeds in creating in Shadows and Fog and even mentions a feeling similar to mine in the dialogue as his character Kleinman guides Mia’s sword swallower to safety. For once, the title of the film describes its visual look. In this city, created on the biggest film set ever placed in New York, characters slip in and out of shadows or find their environment obscured by a pea-souper, often reduced to silhouette, unable to tell who they may bump into.
Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma is very specifically referencing the look of films of Lang, Murnau and Pabst and the German Expressionists in general, where buildings and even the features on human faces become abstract shapes open to interpretation. That means there’s also something of the Hitchock in here too; as the mob head onto Klienman’s trail, I was reminded of climax to The Lodger which isn’t surprising considering that Hitch’s stock storyline is of the wrongly accused man attempting to clear his name by catching the real hoodlum.
If anything the only problem with the film is that in parodying Kafka in a similar vein to Love and Death’s evisceration of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, it’s pulling in all kinds of directions and trying to cover almost too much ground in its eighty minutes. Another director would have filling out an entire running time with the brothel or the lynch mobs or the circus and have and yet Woody has them all interacting with one another. But perhaps that’s its genius. How many other directors would look at Murnau’s Sunrise and wonder what it would be like to have Chaplin wander through?
How many directors for that matter would look at Madonna and think that she’d be perfect for the small role of the tightrope walker? And she is, this being from her Louise Brooks period when she had a charismatic onscreen presence (also visited upon for A League of their Own). This is another film filled to the rafters with a kind of casting porn, with the likes of Jodie Foster and Kathy Bates as prostitutes and John Cusack as their student client, John Malkovich as a clown and even Donald Pleasence as surgeon.
It also sees the return of the cartoon figure who populated those earlier funnier ones, albeit with deeper philosophical underpinnings. Stig Bjorkman suggests it the older character from his then contemporary films, but towards the end he offers a particular smile and years drop away from him; he’s not the man who sat crumpled at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors. As Allen tells Bjorkman, “this is what I’ve been fooling with for a while now, the attempt to try and make comedies that have serious or tragic dimension to them.”
This one of the few occasions when he gets it right.
Preview: The Pacific
TV Having annunciated the European theatre of World War II in the mini-series Band of Brothers, producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks turn their attention to the opposite end of the Earth with The Pacific, based on the memoirs of two soldiers, Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie.
It’s the story of their war and that of legendary US marine John Basilone and the first two episodes, which I was able to watch on preview disc tonight, describe (although frankly that’s an understatement) the Battles of the Tenaru and Henderson Field in which US forces defended a tiny speck of an island from Japanese assault.
Despite being the most expensive television series ever produced according to the publicity materials (around $230 million or the entire year's drama budget for the BBC), The Pacific is still fairly generic, invoking decades of screen mythology from Hell In The Pacific right through to John Woo's underrated The Windtalkers and the Eastwood Iwo-Jima duology.
War film enthusiasts are unlikely to find much that will surprise them and in adapting the material, Bruce McKenna doesn’t offer a revisionist approach; readers of Commando comics will be well served by the heroism on display and at this early stage, the Japanese (with the exception of one poignant scene) are largely the faceless enemy they must have seemed from a rank and file soldier's POV.
All of which said, it’s still bloody exciting and excitingly bloody. Most of the giant mechanical elements of the campaign, the opposing navies attempting to sink each other’s ships happen off screen or in the very distant view of the soldiers we’re embedded with allowing us to understand the hierarchy of war, its parallel fronts and how the big campaign picture was inevitably obscured for those on the found.
We’re witnessing the fragility of these men’s lives and how walking to the left or right could lead to a random fatality. As in the Omaha beachhead opening of Saving Private Ryan, characters die with such rapidity that like the marines we're almost afraid to make friends or have favourites in case they don’t make it through to the next skirmish or scene.
The mechanisms of war are also exposed in a detail I’ve not seen before. We’re shown how one section of the US force was better supplied by another, not just with food but equipment leading to inter-departmental looting, demonstrating that the narrative shortcuts presented in too many films of well stocked battalions were a fallacy even then.
We’re also very aware that weapons these men carried were cumbersome and designed for use in the kind of optimal situations that simply didn’t exist on the ground. Most often they dwarf their carriers and when a machine gun has to be repositioned, it’s still hot from firing and lifting it in the desperation of conflict in order to provide cover elsewhere will lead to third degree burns.
Judging by these first two episodes, the rest of the series should also demonstrate the repetition of these soldiers lives, the relentless shift from one horrible situation to the next and in the Sledge character (played by Joe Mazzello who was the boy in Jurassic Park grown up) who is just signing up at the close of these episodes the gap between the dream of fighting for one’s country and the horrific reality.
The Pacific is on Sky Movies from 9pm on Easter Monday (and hopefully dvd, blu-ray and free to air television some time after).
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Scenes From A Mall (1991)
Then My original recording of Scenes From A Mall is from the middle of the night on ITV in 1999. I remember watching it the following afternoon but not really being able to pay attention to it, being distracted. I can’t remember why. But it was August. August is a strange month.
Now As this rather good contemporary interview with director Paul Mazursky explains, he wanted to make a film about a mall because he was interested in investigating what psychological effect they're having on people and also see what a broken marriage would be like in an atmosphere were a couple could talk about issues that they couldn’t touch on at home. He was running through ideas for couples and even though he didn’t write the script with them in mind, fairly quickly focused on Woody and Bette Midler. He seems quite surprised that Allen agreed to do it, but when he spoke to the agent they share, Woody was apparently keen to make some money and liked the script.
The result is a kind of anti-Woody Allen film. For a start it’s set in Los Angeles, a place which the director consistently insulted across all of his films and largely replaces the high culture of jazz and classical music with rap music and barbershop quartets. It’s also structurally far simpler than any of Allen's work, closer to one of the Richard Linklater Before Sunsomething films, the entire story motoring across a very short slice of time in the couple's life. Woody's character, Nick Fiffer is a rude, insensitive consumerist, confident to a fault and totally lacking in the psychoanalysis which underpins nearly all of Woody’s earlier roles – which is ironic given that his wife is a psychoanalyst (or the reason?).
And yet, despite what Mazursky may have had in mind about casting Woody against type, this is still the same figure that’s populated dozens of his own films. He’s Woody Allen! He was Woody Allen in his last appearance as an actor only (not counting King Lear) in The Front, just less amusing. To cast Woody against type, you would have to place him with a restrictive genre based role as a doctor or lawyer or detective and make the story about procedure rather than character, stripping away the verbal ticks, the gesticulations. Sure he’s mean, yes, he swears, and for first time he plays the adulterer, and he wears Italian suits rather than corduroy but his verbal sparring with Bette just demonstrates how alive he was playing against Diane Keaton in the Annie Hall days.
Which isn’t to say this isn’t a job of acting. Though there is clearly some improvisation – see the bath scene – Woody was apparently very circumspect about the script asking politely about making changes – he’s not like Tom Baker steamrollering in with his own ideas when it looks like he’s not the star. He even has second billing to Midler in the credits. Apparently he hadn’t stepped foot in a mall until the first day of shooting and didn’t know how an escalator worked. But that doesn’t show. And the chemistry with Midler is wonderful. If anything, it’s Midler who at the time was working against expectations in a beautifully poised, understated role. She’s the real surprise. In an award strewn career it’s probably this one she should have been recognised for.
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Alice (1990)
Then The first time I read about Alice was in the late, somewhat lamented Starburst Magazine who seemed quite surprised to be covering a Woody Allen film but were polite and lengthy all the same with a giant picture of Mia filling three quarters of a page. When I finally saw the film as part of the HMV splurge of 1994, I was bored, although I think I did have a cold at the time. One should never watch films for the first time when you’re running a fever. It’s not fair to them.
Now We’re through the looking glass now people, just over halfway through this adventure. As I may have mentioned, I’m tending to watch, through Lovefilm, the movies that the BFI are programming in a given month and in March they’ve scheduled, because of the Tim Burton 3D spectacular, adaptations and films influenced by Alice In Wonderland. From my vague memory I’d wondered why Woody’s film wasn’t included, given the potions and ghostly goings on.
Showing the BFI’s keen curatorial sensibilities, the reason this film wasn’t included (unless it was because of print availability) is that though Alice enters a new emotional wonderland aided by the herbs with their fantastical properties, the icons of Lewis Carroll’s story aren’t included. There isn’t a white rabbit exactly. Some people are seen playing cards and Alec Baldwin’s ghost has a Cheshire cat grin. But if Mia’s character was called Mildred, the audience might not make a direct connection.
In fact, now that I turn as ever to the Bjorkman interview, he actively distances himself from Carroll, stating that he chose Alice because it’s “a quintessential kind of rich WASPy name” and it might as well have been Leslie. Woody instead explains that he was trying to make a comic version of Another Woman, with the device of listening in (this time through invisibility) as the way of provoking the character to change her life after viewing her so-called friends and position from the outside.
That allows him to finally give Mia a proper starring role in which she’s allowed to offer the wide range of emotions that she was always obviously capable of but generally only allowed to offer one character at a time. Across the film, via the herbs, Alice becomes a seductress, adultress, gossip, horrendously stoned and finally as feminine as she’s perhaps ever been. Mia is one of my small revelations during the process; far from the repellent slightly winy figure I’d remembered, she’s funny, resilient and at times incredibly sexy. And that’s just in this film.
She’s ably supported by the men, but Woody is careful never to let them take over, with understandable exception of Keye Luke as Mr. Yang, her spiritual guide who’s hypnotic voice drives her forward. If William Hurt at times seems like he’s wandered in from an Adrian Lynne domestic revenge thriller, Joe Mantegna is incredible, demonstrating how underused he’s been across his career playing dozens of mafia figures. His speechless reaction to Alice’s advances is one of his best ever scenes. When Woody says that half his directing is done in the casting, this is the kind of film which demonstrates what that means.
There are other casting surprises. Baldwin (in the same year as Hunt For Red October) appears as the ghostly presence of one of Mia past lovers, offering relationship to advice to Mia just as Bogart did for Allan in Play It Again, Sam. A post-Moonlighting Cybill Shepherd has a tiny role as a tv producer. This is Bernadette Peters’s only appearance in a Woody Allen film as a Muse (“Very deep is exactly where he wants to put it”). At one point a famous model is pointed out, she turns around, and it’s Elle McPhereson. Even Bob Balaban is in there somewhere towards the end. It’s also a good film for Woody ensemble watchers with Julie Kavner cameoing, Blythe Danner and the first appearance from Judy Davis.
As you can tell from all these paragraphs I’m quite enamoured with Alice (and its casting). It’s not his best film; it’s at least ten minutes too long and Carlo Di Palma is back behind the camera with his very long takes which make some scenes drag a bit. The orientalist “other” approach to Far Eastern culture is a shame but in vogue at the time (see Gremlins and Blade Runner). But as an attempt to inject magic and fantasy into what theorist Molly Haskell called “women’s films” and offer a third way at the conclusion from the usual climax of such things as marriage or oblivion it has to be applauded.
Alice was seriously underrated. By me.
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
Then Another Friday evening Leeds Metropolitan University viewing. In 1993, I think. Even then I could see that in producing a film every year Woody had developed a system of larger budget pieces with large casts and smaller chamber works, somehow managing to deal with huge themes on different scales. Spoilers ahead. Spoilers!
Now In Crimes and Misdemeanors, rather like the old sitcom Dream On, Woody employs old film clips to comment directly on the action, to show the differences and similarities between “fiction” and “reality”. His first and most interesting choice is Hitchcock’s Mr & Mrs Smith, which as we saw last year was that director’s only, not particularly successful, attempt at straight romantic comedy. Crimes is about similar genre games, devoting near equal screen time to a late Hitchcockian thriller and a romantic comedy and seeing if they can exist within the same universe.
In the Bjorkman interview Woody says that like Hannah and Her Sisters, he was being influenced by novels and mentions Tolstoy as a standard. But his experimentation goes deeper than that because he looks to see if it’s possible for the thriller to have a happy if morally ambiguous ending and the rom com to end in tragedy. Martin Landau’s happily married ophthalmologist Judah is adulterous and gets away with murder; Woody Allen’s unhappily married documentary maker Cliff thinks about adultery (a lot) and is rewarded with divorce, the suicide of his subject and a broken heart. The audience is left intellectually stimulated but not emotionally satisfied.
Something I did notice watching the film in sequence is how the relationship between Landau and Anjelica Houston’s air hostess patterns as the playing out of the Frederick/Lee coupling from Hannah, if she’d been less emotionally stable and he was more arrogant about his position in society. I don’t think Caine’s character was so ethically black that he would have even considered Judah’s “solution” but both films share the existential discussion of what a man is capable of, even if here, the internal discussion reserved for voiceover is played out against a backdrop of dream sequences and the return of the spectres of Another Woman.
Incidentally, this is the last of these three films photographed by Sven Nykvist in sequence. A few days ago, I made the rash statement that all of the cinematographers that followed Gordon Willis were to some extent following his lead. I still stand by that. Nykvist is more free with his camera work and longer scenes do take place in front of a camera which is moving about an environment more than Willis who tended to hold a shot for a period taking in a full space. More close-ups perhaps. But just as when he worked with Bergman the director’s vision had primacy, so the pallet and shapes in these three films aren’t that different. The colour pallet hasn’t shifted outrageously.
Cliff’s resulting hatchet job reminds me of the Yesterday’s Men, the satirical documentary about former PM Harold Wilson which was suppressed, though subsequently clips have been used elsewhere, one of which shows Wilson at a clifftop with a specially commissioned song by the scaffold "Yesterday's Men" playing over the top. Here's the key audio clip. People really don't like to be made fun of in what they think is going to be a serious portrayal, especially if they have no sense of humour about themselves.
Daryl Hannah plays an uncredited role as one of Alda’s conquests. Nora Ephron features in a speaking role and the film ends on voiceover with a series of clips from earlier on – was Woody homaging When Harry Met Sally back again? Crimes also has one of Woody’s best one-liners and certainly the most on the nose since Annie Hall. When his sister suggests that in marriage, “Once the sex goes, it all goes,” Cliff replies, “It’s true. The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.” If ever one of his jokes developed a life of its own! Often imitated, seldom bettered.
Now, and I’ve been waiting to do this, finally I can ask:
Who’s In It From Doctor Who?
Claire Bloom as Miriam Rosenthal:
Was The Woman/The Doctor's Mother/The Doctor's Daughter/Susan/The Rani/Flavia/Iris Wyldethyme/Jenny/Romana/whoever the hell she was in The End of Time
Liverpool Twestival 2010.
Liverpool Life Last night I attended/visited/went to the Liverpool Twestival which this year/season/month was at the Pan Am bar at the Albert Dock.
A really entertaining evening and even easier than previous gatherings because instead of a sea of unfamiliar faces, there was immediately someone to wave at.
Not that I wasn't still a bit nervous about doing something horrendously embarrassing.
Not that I don't think I entirely managed to get away with it.
Must not wear big heavy shoes again.
Luckily, there were still plenty of new people to shamelessly hand my moo minicards out to.
Entertainment was provided by Man Get Out and later some jazz musicians.
I won a pizza delivery voucher in the raffle, a good enough reason to cheat on my self inflicted cheese ban. I'm trying to lose some weight.
Reports suggest that the event managed to raise over a thousand pounds for the official charity Concern.
Congratulations to @paulinecoxy for organising such a marvellous and relaxed and successful event.
A really entertaining evening and even easier than previous gatherings because instead of a sea of unfamiliar faces, there was immediately someone to wave at.
Not that I wasn't still a bit nervous about doing something horrendously embarrassing.
Not that I don't think I entirely managed to get away with it.
Must not wear big heavy shoes again.
Luckily, there were still plenty of new people to shamelessly hand my moo minicards out to.
Entertainment was provided by Man Get Out and later some jazz musicians.
I won a pizza delivery voucher in the raffle, a good enough reason to cheat on my self inflicted cheese ban. I'm trying to lose some weight.
Reports suggest that the event managed to raise over a thousand pounds for the official charity Concern.
Congratulations to @paulinecoxy for organising such a marvellous and relaxed and successful event.
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Then When Harry Met Sally was the first film I recorded on the Matsui video recorder I was given for Christmas on Boxing Day 1992. That’s the recording I watched incessantly week in and out for years. Imagine my surprise when I finally invested in a sell-thru copy and realised the BBC had snipped the swearing in the argument scene after Harry met Helen over Surry With A Fringe On Top.
It’s one of my favourite films, poster on my wall for nearly a decade, top five, copper bottom, listed in by hundred things about me on this blog and printed on a Moo minicard. No one involved, from Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal to Norah Ephron and Rob Reiner would make a better film and I don’t think that a romantic comedy of this quality has been produced in the past twenty years. It’s miraculous.
Now I haven’t gone mad by the way. I know this isn’t a Woody Allen film exactly in that he had nothing to do with its production, but as a way of extending the entertainment, I’m also including a few films which to an extent have clearly been influenced by Woody’s films to one degree or another.
Stephen J. Spignesi devotes an entire chapter in The Woody Allen Companion (title: “The “Woody Allen Movie” Not Made by Woody Allen” would you believe) to reproducing an article from Premiere magazine in 1989 pointing out the similarities between this film and Allen’s oeuvre, with Spignesi himself offering a few more.
He describes writer Ephron as Woody’s biggest fan and the argument is persuasive. From the credits, which feature white writing on a black background (albeit in the wrong font) to the closing moments which seem to meld elements of Annie Hall (Harry realising he’s in love with Sally during a montage just as Woody did) and Manhattan (running to sweep her off her feet afterwards just as Isaac did for Tracy).
They inhabit similar sonic landscapes with Harry Connick Jr. offering renditions of many of the song which had appeared in Woody’s films, particularly It Had To Be You, whith Diane Keaton sings so touchingly in Annie Hall. Similarly, Sally’s wardrobe has more than a passing resemblance to Annie’s. The overall impression is of an love letter to Woody's films with Diana Keaton.
Ephron also does drops references into her dialogue to people putting their names in books so that they’ll be able to tell who’s is what at the end of a relationship (Annie Hall), to Casablanca and to the ordering of food (Play It Again, Sam). There is an improvisational quality too, with the likes of "pepperrr" made up on the spot (and you can see Meg looking off camera to the crew in embarrassment).
As Spignesi notes, the framing structure, of older couples talking about how they first met, is similar to Take The Money And Run even if they’re not speaking directly about Harry and Sally. And the ravishing shots of the city, from the oranges of Central Park to the modernist concrete of the museums suggest the colour equivalent of what Manhattan achieved.
Some of the connections offered are more tenuous. They both have reading scenes and scenes set in bookstores, characters sharing professions and the repetitions of actions without the other person appearing for melancholic purposes. The former feels more like a coincidence and the latter merely a trope of romantic comedy in general.
I think it’s more clearer to say that When Harry Met Sally, the Woody Allen films and the Neil Simon's are all part of a romantic comedy sub-genre set in the upmarket Autumnal sections of New York set to a jazz soundtrack, amongst people of a particular social class who read similar magazines and attend the same kinds of parties with Sex In The City and Friends the televisual equivalents.
The rhythms of Ephron and Allen’s dialogue are very dissimilar; When Harry Met Sally sounds closer to a Robert Riskin screwball comedy from the 30s, the cultural references more pop culture related and middle brow, television rather than theatre. It’s also shot in more conventional style – Gordon Willis favoured characters in landscapes whereas Barry Sonnenfeld, the photographer here, lets most of the action play out across Meg and Billy’s faces.
Similarly it could be argued that Reiner’s film might not have existed in this form without Manhattan, Annie Hall, even Hannah and Her Sisters providing some of the ground work in presenting New York as a place as potentially romantic as Paris or Venice, except of course that it also ignores the contribution of Neil Simon, especially Barefoot In The Park.
I’m just, having watched the film again in relation to Woody’s career, weary of saying that When Harry Met Sally is “The “Woody Allen Movie” Not Made by Woody Allen” because it’s not.
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Somebody or The Rise and Fall of Philosophy (1989)
Then See below.
Now Somebody or The Rise and Fall of Philosophy is a twenty-five minute short film made in Germany by director Axel Hildebrand. According to the imdb (and I think you can see where this is heading) it’s about “gorgeous philosophy student Heather Buttkiss who hires hard-boiled private eye "Kaiser" (="Emperor") Lupowitz to find God (because everyone else in her class will just speculate but she wants to *know*). His investigation leads him to Jewish rabbis, atheistic gangsters, even the Pope himself. But when HE is found murdered, "Kaiser" himself falls under suspicion.”
Woody has a writing credit because it’s based on one of his plays, “Mr Big” which appears in the first collection, Getting Even (1971). I’ve not been able to track down the Hildebrand version, but YouTube offers this rendition of the hiring scene from the North Carolina School of Arts School of Filmmaking featuring what looks like (but obviously isn’t) a twelve year old Simon Pegg:
And if that isn’t enough, here it is again in East European, origin less certain:
Now Somebody or The Rise and Fall of Philosophy is a twenty-five minute short film made in Germany by director Axel Hildebrand. According to the imdb (and I think you can see where this is heading) it’s about “gorgeous philosophy student Heather Buttkiss who hires hard-boiled private eye "Kaiser" (="Emperor") Lupowitz to find God (because everyone else in her class will just speculate but she wants to *know*). His investigation leads him to Jewish rabbis, atheistic gangsters, even the Pope himself. But when HE is found murdered, "Kaiser" himself falls under suspicion.”
Woody has a writing credit because it’s based on one of his plays, “Mr Big” which appears in the first collection, Getting Even (1971). I’ve not been able to track down the Hildebrand version, but YouTube offers this rendition of the hiring scene from the North Carolina School of Arts School of Filmmaking featuring what looks like (but obviously isn’t) a twelve year old Simon Pegg:
And if that isn’t enough, here it is again in East European, origin less certain:
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: New York Stories: Oedipus Wrecks (1989)
Then Fittingly for a film with three different strands, I can think of three distinct times I originally watched New York Stories. At Tris’s flat, at university and during Channel 4’s New York at Christmas season. I can’t remember which was the first. The first section, Life Lessons is in my top three favourite Scorsese films (the others being The Last Temptation of Christ and The Aviator – I’m weird) and I’ve previously waxed lyrical about film editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s contribution here. Coppola’s Life Without Zoe has also been mentioned in relation to the Eloise animations.
Now The New York Stories project was an idea that turned up in a discussion between producer Robert Greenhut and Woody, who was looking for something to cleanse his mental pallet on the back of working so intensively on September and Another Woman. Originally the three directors were to be Allen, Scorsese and Spielberg, but Steven was busy and so Coppolla plugged the gap. True to form, up until the publication of his interview with Bjorkman he hadn’t seen the film, which is a shame because he was missing Nick Nolte’s best performance, Rosanna Arquette looking dazzling (and oddly like a taller Sarah Michelle Gellar) and a rather wonderful evocation of the coping mechanisms of lonely rich kids.
Woody’s end of the film was a product of an idle daydream. He was listening to a Sydney Bechet jazz record one day and wistfully looking towards the sky and wondered about how cool it would be if the soprano saxophonist appeared and filled the city with live music. Then he thought that funnier idea would if it was his mother and all she did all day was nag. Then he thought of the magic show, of her disappearing from an illusionist’s grasp only to have her giant eyes regarding her son’s every move. The stroke of genius in terms of this is portrayed in the film, is that the city is beguiled by her (and her crime fighting abilities) while Woody’s character Sheldon and his fiancé slowly find their world is falling apart as she turns large parts of the New York community against them.
Oedipus Wrecks is (or was – these tenses are becoming increasingly confusing) his outright funniest film since Annie Hall. Of course to an extent that’s by design – romantic comedies by their nature can’t spend all of their time being just funny – but the laugh quotient in this half hour is higher than some films which deliberately go out of their way to be outrageous bursts of glee. Obviously a lot of that has to do with Mae Questel’s delivery as the archetypical mother whose relationship with Sheldon is not unlike Barbara Lott in the Ronnie Corbett sitcom Sorry! emasculating her son at every turn effectively until he finds a nice goy. But Woody’s also on his best form in years, his timing superb as his eye continually roll with the recognition that his mother is in the process of embarrassing him. Again. The moment in which he realises that Julie Kavner’s “psychic” is the woman for him is one of my favourite Woody Allen moments so far.
To be fair and balanced (eep) Stephen Spignesi in The Woody Allen Companion is less thrilled with Wrecks. He speaks of potential squandered, of scenes being too short for the humour to register, the occult rituals with the funny head dresses not being milked nearly enough. And that Mia basically walks through her role though he acknowledges her beauty. Right, Mia first. Whilst its true that Mia’s role isn’t huge and she doesn’t have that much to do, with such a slender running time in fact all she needs to do is to be straight-laced, non-Jewish, a bit unsympathetic and unacceptable to Sheldon’s mother.
The jokes: Spignesi wrote that criticism in the early nineties and I wonder if it’s a product of a time when film comedy and especially gag based film comedy was slower. True, the Airport films were very fast paced, but often the jokes played out within much longer scenes, whereas the cutting in Wrecks is often very swift and perhaps that’s simply become more acceptable in the world of The Fast Show, Family Guy and Robot Chicken when a scene is barely in play before the joke comes and the viewer is faced with another scenario. Over time we’ve learned to appreciate some jokes, even visual, stop being funny once you’ve laughed at the punchline.
Two final bits of casting trivia. The film was Kirsten Dunst's screen debut playing one of Mia's kids (altogether now -- oh bless!). Larry David also features as a theatre manager:
Now The New York Stories project was an idea that turned up in a discussion between producer Robert Greenhut and Woody, who was looking for something to cleanse his mental pallet on the back of working so intensively on September and Another Woman. Originally the three directors were to be Allen, Scorsese and Spielberg, but Steven was busy and so Coppolla plugged the gap. True to form, up until the publication of his interview with Bjorkman he hadn’t seen the film, which is a shame because he was missing Nick Nolte’s best performance, Rosanna Arquette looking dazzling (and oddly like a taller Sarah Michelle Gellar) and a rather wonderful evocation of the coping mechanisms of lonely rich kids.
Woody’s end of the film was a product of an idle daydream. He was listening to a Sydney Bechet jazz record one day and wistfully looking towards the sky and wondered about how cool it would be if the soprano saxophonist appeared and filled the city with live music. Then he thought that funnier idea would if it was his mother and all she did all day was nag. Then he thought of the magic show, of her disappearing from an illusionist’s grasp only to have her giant eyes regarding her son’s every move. The stroke of genius in terms of this is portrayed in the film, is that the city is beguiled by her (and her crime fighting abilities) while Woody’s character Sheldon and his fiancé slowly find their world is falling apart as she turns large parts of the New York community against them.
Oedipus Wrecks is (or was – these tenses are becoming increasingly confusing) his outright funniest film since Annie Hall. Of course to an extent that’s by design – romantic comedies by their nature can’t spend all of their time being just funny – but the laugh quotient in this half hour is higher than some films which deliberately go out of their way to be outrageous bursts of glee. Obviously a lot of that has to do with Mae Questel’s delivery as the archetypical mother whose relationship with Sheldon is not unlike Barbara Lott in the Ronnie Corbett sitcom Sorry! emasculating her son at every turn effectively until he finds a nice goy. But Woody’s also on his best form in years, his timing superb as his eye continually roll with the recognition that his mother is in the process of embarrassing him. Again. The moment in which he realises that Julie Kavner’s “psychic” is the woman for him is one of my favourite Woody Allen moments so far.
To be fair and balanced (eep) Stephen Spignesi in The Woody Allen Companion is less thrilled with Wrecks. He speaks of potential squandered, of scenes being too short for the humour to register, the occult rituals with the funny head dresses not being milked nearly enough. And that Mia basically walks through her role though he acknowledges her beauty. Right, Mia first. Whilst its true that Mia’s role isn’t huge and she doesn’t have that much to do, with such a slender running time in fact all she needs to do is to be straight-laced, non-Jewish, a bit unsympathetic and unacceptable to Sheldon’s mother.
The jokes: Spignesi wrote that criticism in the early nineties and I wonder if it’s a product of a time when film comedy and especially gag based film comedy was slower. True, the Airport films were very fast paced, but often the jokes played out within much longer scenes, whereas the cutting in Wrecks is often very swift and perhaps that’s simply become more acceptable in the world of The Fast Show, Family Guy and Robot Chicken when a scene is barely in play before the joke comes and the viewer is faced with another scenario. Over time we’ve learned to appreciate some jokes, even visual, stop being funny once you’ve laughed at the punchline.
Two final bits of casting trivia. The film was Kirsten Dunst's screen debut playing one of Mia's kids (altogether now -- oh bless!). Larry David also features as a theatre manager:
Erm... It looks like the Sugababes project is over for now. In the week when Lada Gaga and the Glee Cast fight for the top slot in the charts (Gaga winning with a travesty of a video), 'Sweet 7' dropped from the top 30. Without plaudits from the music press and further afield (even The Guardian gave them a poor review), it seems the public had little time for this middling electronica. Their time has passed we're sure.
miniblog archive
BBC One ageism.
TV You will have seen or heard a story this morning accusing the BBC of ageism yet again, especially on BBC One. The Guardian reports:
From the information available, the survey doesn't include all on-screen contributors from the information provided, just presenters and actors. If you included contributors -- ie, interviewees, guests and contestants on gameshows, the figure would be increased considerably. To just include presenters and actors poorly represents what is being presented on screen. Most of the people being interviewed on Countryfile for example are over fifty but they wouldn't have been added either.
Plus, one week's worth of programmes looks like a very small sample for this kind of survey, since special events can blur the statistics. Looking at the schedule for BBC One that week, In an ordinary week, the usual episodes of Larkrise, Antiques Roadshow, Songs of Praise and New Tricks would have bumped up the numbers, but at the end of February there was also loads of live athletics and the Bafta Awards. How did they deal with that? Did they include all of the people giving and receiving awards because from what I remember it was mostly young people giving older people the "bronze" faces.
But the survey looks spurious anyway because it apparently Five had no presenters or actors on screen for that week, despite the multiple episodes of NCIS with David McCallum who was born in 1933. An import, certainly, but in looking at other reports trying to find a copy of the survey on-line, I've found nothing to say what did or didn't include in that direction. If they did only feature home-grown material then that has to be underlined.
Whilst it's true that older presenters and actors can get a raw deal on television, attempting to prove the point by narrowing the statistics is not the way to go. They can come back to me when they've looked at a few month's worth and a larger sample and properly represent what the viewer is actually seeing on screen.
"The study, which examined a week's worth of TV output, found that BBC2 had the highest proportion of actors and presenters aged over 50, with 37%, but BBC1 had just 20% of its presenters and cast members aged over 50%, compared with 27% on ITV1. Channel 4 had only 12% of presenters actors aged 50 or over, while Channel Five had none at all.Taking into account that no one seems to be taking a metaphoric baseball bat to Channel 4 because it's still considered to be a "youth" service even though it's predominately trying to go toe-to-toe with BBC television much of the time, I haven't really been trained in quantitative research but two elements are likely to skew the results away from favouring BBC One in that week.
Overall, the The Older Faces Audit, by market research consultants PCP, found that 22% of presenters and cast members were over 50, compared with 34% of the general population. The study, commissioned by retirement village company Anchor, monitored TV programmes on the five main terrestrial channels from 20 February to 26 February.
From the information available, the survey doesn't include all on-screen contributors from the information provided, just presenters and actors. If you included contributors -- ie, interviewees, guests and contestants on gameshows, the figure would be increased considerably. To just include presenters and actors poorly represents what is being presented on screen. Most of the people being interviewed on Countryfile for example are over fifty but they wouldn't have been added either.
Plus, one week's worth of programmes looks like a very small sample for this kind of survey, since special events can blur the statistics. Looking at the schedule for BBC One that week, In an ordinary week, the usual episodes of Larkrise, Antiques Roadshow, Songs of Praise and New Tricks would have bumped up the numbers, but at the end of February there was also loads of live athletics and the Bafta Awards. How did they deal with that? Did they include all of the people giving and receiving awards because from what I remember it was mostly young people giving older people the "bronze" faces.
But the survey looks spurious anyway because it apparently Five had no presenters or actors on screen for that week, despite the multiple episodes of NCIS with David McCallum who was born in 1933. An import, certainly, but in looking at other reports trying to find a copy of the survey on-line, I've found nothing to say what did or didn't include in that direction. If they did only feature home-grown material then that has to be underlined.
Whilst it's true that older presenters and actors can get a raw deal on television, attempting to prove the point by narrowing the statistics is not the way to go. They can come back to me when they've looked at a few month's worth and a larger sample and properly represent what the viewer is actually seeing on screen.
New nu-Who new USA trailer.
That's more like it. Loads of dialogue, moments of charm ("They're scared of me..."), more a sense of what the performances are going to be like and a confirmation that this is a very different programme from the one which ended on New Year's Day.
New nu-Who new USA trailer.
That's more like it. Loads of dialogue, moments of charm ("They're scared of me..."), more a sense of what the performances are going to be like and a confirmation that this is a very different programme from the one which ended on New Year's Day.
Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Another Woman (1988)
Then A rare example of a film that I watched during a television broadcast which was on Boxing Day 1994 according to the BFI’s film database. I fell asleep. Which interesting because I fell asleep on this occasion as well. What we have here is Woody Allen film as possible cure for insomnia.
Now One of Woody’s more obvious filmic experiments, in Another Woman he asks whether its possible to have an intellectual as a sympathetic character within a relationship drama. Generally in films, the sympathetic clever people tend to be boffins prophesising then battling against global decimation, detectives or within a story in which their learnin’ is beside the point. In Another Woman, Gina Rowlands’s character is confronted with the truth that her intellect has subsumed her emotional side leading her to distance herself from those who are supposed to closest to her.
Unfortunately, and this demonstrates the failure of the experiment, she also succeeds in distancing the audience from her as well. That’s not technically because of Gina Rowlands’s performance. She’s accomplishing what Woody called upon her to do which is to shut down the more histrionic elements of her work with Cassavettes. It’s simply that as the director suspected because he nearly puts the words in Mia Farrow’s pregnant mother’s mouth, we’re unable to unpick the connection between the characters life and accomplishments and her attitude, understand why someone like that could be so neurotic.
The director originally envisioned the central idea as a comedy. A man moves into an apartment next door to a psychiatrists office and like Rowlands hears the confessions of a young lady which he then uses to help or seduce her. He then switched the idea, in a pre-echo of Melina and Melinda, to see what it would happen if it was a woman and a drama and a Bergmanesque piece at that. Perhaps his mistake was to draw it even further away and make Farrow’s character even less consequential, not have the two real characters meet too far into the picture, preferring instead to shift their connection into dream sequences and the metaphysical.
It seems as though Rowlands’s learning experience could have been in taking this daughter-like figure under her wing helped along by the extra insight provided by her eavesdropping, forever changing her own behaviour to accommodate whatever Mia is thinking of her, more of a two-hander, a rare occasion when Allen’s ability to gathered a wonderful cast works against the product. Not that there isn’t a guilty pleasure in seeing Hackman, Holm, Plimpton and Danner in a Woody Allen film – it’s an example from this period of the director moving away from his typical repertory – except in this case they’re a distraction from the main point.
Here, nevertheless is my favourite scene. "I've never liked you. By the way, can I borrow some money?"
Now One of Woody’s more obvious filmic experiments, in Another Woman he asks whether its possible to have an intellectual as a sympathetic character within a relationship drama. Generally in films, the sympathetic clever people tend to be boffins prophesising then battling against global decimation, detectives or within a story in which their learnin’ is beside the point. In Another Woman, Gina Rowlands’s character is confronted with the truth that her intellect has subsumed her emotional side leading her to distance herself from those who are supposed to closest to her.
Unfortunately, and this demonstrates the failure of the experiment, she also succeeds in distancing the audience from her as well. That’s not technically because of Gina Rowlands’s performance. She’s accomplishing what Woody called upon her to do which is to shut down the more histrionic elements of her work with Cassavettes. It’s simply that as the director suspected because he nearly puts the words in Mia Farrow’s pregnant mother’s mouth, we’re unable to unpick the connection between the characters life and accomplishments and her attitude, understand why someone like that could be so neurotic.
The director originally envisioned the central idea as a comedy. A man moves into an apartment next door to a psychiatrists office and like Rowlands hears the confessions of a young lady which he then uses to help or seduce her. He then switched the idea, in a pre-echo of Melina and Melinda, to see what it would happen if it was a woman and a drama and a Bergmanesque piece at that. Perhaps his mistake was to draw it even further away and make Farrow’s character even less consequential, not have the two real characters meet too far into the picture, preferring instead to shift their connection into dream sequences and the metaphysical.
It seems as though Rowlands’s learning experience could have been in taking this daughter-like figure under her wing helped along by the extra insight provided by her eavesdropping, forever changing her own behaviour to accommodate whatever Mia is thinking of her, more of a two-hander, a rare occasion when Allen’s ability to gathered a wonderful cast works against the product. Not that there isn’t a guilty pleasure in seeing Hackman, Holm, Plimpton and Danner in a Woody Allen film – it’s an example from this period of the director moving away from his typical repertory – except in this case they’re a distraction from the main point.
Here, nevertheless is my favourite scene. "I've never liked you. By the way, can I borrow some money?"
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