wildcat

With regards to the Bride & Prejudice plan, the film's already out of the Odeon and while it's supposed to end up at Cincenta shortly, we couldn't go to it last night. Instead - on a lark - we went to Woody Allen's new offering, Melinda and Melinda. A very solid movie, considering the uneven films that Allen's been making lately. It focuses on four people, a woman and three men, out to dinner in New York (because this is the only place on the planet), discussing life; is it essentially tragic or essentially comic?

One of the characters offers up a story - the specifics of which we never see - and the two playwrights at the table take the story and weave radical interpretations of it from the frameworks of tragedy and comedy. I thought the film worked really well for having a specific structure it followed. The ending felt a bit telegraphed - you know almost from the first scene what the ultimate point will be, so why do they need to clarify it for us right before the end credits? But the acting was top-notch and Allen had the opportunity to write two differently styled movies - one, a "spiralling down" melodrama about a woman on the verge of complete destruction and the other, a slapstick romantic comedy. Generally the tragedy was more hilarious than anything but delivered in an entirely deadpan manner, and the comedy was wildly ridiculous.

Radha Mitchell is the central character - the Melinda of both worlds - and I think she's given a real opportunity to demonstrate her acting chops; she can be the troubled but ultimately endearing romantic comedy Melinda, and she can be the overly dramatic Melinda of the tragedy. She worked best in the tragedy simply because she could deliver the elevated language and purple prose of the dialogue completely deadpan. Will Ferrell normally annoys me but he was quite solid in this, as the romantic comedy's equivalent of the Woody Allen character (Woody stayed out of the picture, as it were) with an mostly understated version of himself. There was some opportunity for meta-filmic stuff (Ferrell's character is an actor who constantly plays whatever character "with a limp" much like Woody Allen plays every character as Woody Allen) but it didn't too overboard with it.