Melinda & Melinda: two nuthin's is nuthin'!

I kid, I kid! This film was great! Woody Allen has been playing with storytelling for years, and this is simply his latest experiment. Poepl are all bent out of shape cause hes not as good as the Annie Hall days, but if oyu go back and watch that film, it's got the same meldramatic dialogue, the same self-effacing schtick, the same alternately wacky and stunning moments. He's the same writer and director! There's gonna be a certain shared soul between the work! It's just that we can't discover him for the first time with each new film, so his very particular style can't ever be surprise. When going into his films, people need to realize they are viewing a sort of sketchbook of his, in film. Not to say the projects are incomplete, just that Woody Allen makes a film a year, so if it's not the quintissential embodiment of that time and his art, what does he stress? I think he sees each new film as an opportunity to stretch in a new direction. I go into each film with that in mind: let's see what Woody's cooked up this time 'round... So the characters all live rich, but unfulfilled lives in classy New York. So no one ever really communicates with one another, even if they all talk like Woody. So blubbering little toads end up getting all the women. What do ya want? It's Woody Allen!

To me, it's a joy to sit down and see those stark white opening credits over old-timey jazz. It's a joy to hear the Allen character (Will Farrel, in this case) sputter and trip his way through emotional entanglements. It's all par for the course, but in a new setting (intellectually, not literally) of an old landscape. And maybe I'm just a product of my generation (well who isn't...), but Will Farrel was hilarious! He puts a spin on the aformentioned blubbering little toad that compliments the material and the actor. Farrel's wide-eyed lightning-quick reactions that lead nowhere need heady thought-processes (as opposed to Kickng and Screaming... oy...) to make his huge gestures sensical!

What struck me about the premise (two writers take us into their own interpretations of a story, as seen from a tragic, or comic perspective) was that because one was a comedy, I really felt the saddest ends of the emotions, and during the tragedy, I laughed at what may not have been intended humor. That is to say, because the intended tone was loud and clear, I was reacting to the "non-tonal" moments, most of all. It's as if I was given this wall to lean upon ("this is a funny scene--you can trust that."), so I was looking toward the other end of the story-telling spectrum, and seeing the opposite's elements. Make sense? And that was what Allen was saying, I think. The comedy version of the story was told by the tragedy writer, because he saw the world as tragic, and people therefor need to laugh--so a real life event must be a comedy, becase it's so tragic--see? And the the other story, the darker of the two, was told by a playwrite who apparently writes comedies, and mentioned that his plays are not as popular, because when people step in to fantasy, they want to see a tragedy, since the universe is ultimately comedic. Read that over again, I think you'll understand.

What I'm getting at, is that Allen used this film's strange format to ultimately say that in tragedy is comedy, and in comedy is tragedy. Just look at the movie poster. The tragic side has peopl smiling, while the comic side has them looking serious. It's all a series of crossovers because our minds naturally blend one into another. As the Bare Naked Ladies say "I'm the kind of guy who laughs at a funeral".

Max Boschert-Zielsdorf lives in Seattle, and is a writer for this one blog, and for various pieces of immature graffiti in bus terminals. He doesn't often use the Bare Naked Ladies as intellectual reference pieces, but then occaisionaly he does.