A Rainy Day in New York (2019, Woody Allen) (Patreon)

41/100

Maybe there's no longer much point in belaboring this sort of thing, but here we have a movie about present-day college students in which someone gets dumped for the unforgivable crime of failing to recognize Cole Porter lyrics. Allen arguably out-Transits Transit, except that the recurring cognitive dissonance speaks to nothing more than his utter disconnection from contemporary life; when Selena Gomez delivers a one-liner like "You're not gonna start singing 'Gigi,' are you?", it feels like he's recycled dialogue from a film he made 40 years ago (though that joke would've been a tad moldy even then), as part of some admirably misguided experiment à la Van Sant's Psycho. Truth be told, his basic story instincts are still reasonably sound—I quite like, on paper, the idea of a young couple heading to Manhattan for the day and then going on separate adventures that ultimately split them up ("The city has its own agenda," as one character puts it)—but a beautifully designed building won't stand if every brick is made out of cardboard. Chalamet, as "Gatsby Welles" [pause for derisive snorting], gives the latest in a long line of embarrassing pseudo-Woody performances; Fanning starts out equally mannered but loosens up marvelously once Ashleigh gets drunk (the moment in which she helpfully shows Rebecca Hall her student ID, as if being carded, after Hall refers to her as Jude Law's "15-year-old concubine" was my one legit LOL); Gomez, surprisingly, fares best of all, perhaps by virtue of being a lesser actor who relaxes into the artifice rather than trying to make these stale lines sound credible (or maybe she's a better actor than I'd assumed). Also, did Storaro not know the movie's title? Awful lot of distractingly gorgeous sunlight streaming through car windows and so forth on such a rainy day.

["Why did you even bother watching this?" some of you may be wondering. Ironically, odds are that I'd have skipped it had it played in the U.S., just as I skipped the poorly-reviewed (and not-Cannes-opening) Whatever Works and To Rome With Love. But one of my numerous dorky "rules" involves seeking out undistributed films by favorite directors, and Woody Allen will remain one of mine—albeit a favorite who hasn't made a film I love in nearly 25 years—even if he turns out to be the Zodiac Killer. While I respect those who feel that they can no longer watch his work, or Polanski's, or The Cosby Show, etc., that's just not my own ethical stance. In any case, the answer to "Why did you even bother watching this?" is basically "I was tired of having it take up space on my hard drive." Put it off for months, as there was zero indication that it would be any good.]