Blue Jasmine

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source: Blue Jasmine

This is just another typical Woody Allen film, full of emotional upheaval and short on anything else. It is a contrived story about two unrelated women, who were adopted by the same parents years ago. One (Jasmine) has "superior" genes to her "sister" (Ginger), but both end up beaten by the game of life. Jasmine from New York comes in to Ginger's life in San Francisco because of her successful husband's downfall. Through flashbacks, we see Jasmine and hubby living "the good life", full of clichéd snobby dialogue, gestures and hammy bad treatment of Ginger and first husband years ago. Fast forward to the present, where all is lost! Superficial Jasmine has become pill-popping, vodka-swilling stress bunny extraordinaire, sighing, moaning, lip-curling over Ginger's orange apartment and her loser boyfriends. Somehow, although the action is San Francisco, everyone we meet has a strong Bronx accent, and of course, the usual Woody Allen New York jazz-style soundtrack follows the action wherever we are. Simplistic and shallow as it is, Cate Blanchett tries very hard to channel Lauren Bacall and make something of her role, but cannot overcome the dumb plot and poor script.

Blue jasmine directed by Woody Allen is excellent. The movie Blue Jasmine with Cate Blanchett as Jasmine focuses on a woman who has reasons to be sad. Jasmine is elegant, sophisticated, has rich tastes and loves a carefree rich life. She is full of love for her husband Hal ( Alec Baldwin) who is handsome,sophisticated, wealthy, a womanizer, and a swindler. Jasmine's sister Ginger who is in San Francisco does not share her parents nor her genes. Both Jasmine and Ginger , born to different sets of parents, were adopted by the same family. There is nothing in common between the Jasmine and Ginger. Ginger, mother of 2, a recent divorcée is happy to have a hard working, honest, construction worker as her boyfriend. When Jasmine's world falls apart in NY, she flies to SF to live with Ginger for moral support. Jasmine is an emotional wreck and has to fight angels and demons in her life. Cate Blanchett did a great job at acting as a neurotic, anxious female dependent on Xanax , willing to dream of a pleasant and stable future but afraid to let go of the past. Anxiety , loneliness and depression in a woman are depicted very well and Cate Blanchett is terrific. Jasmine wants the best and Cate Blanchett as Jasmine deserves Oscars for best actress. This is the first movie by Woody Allen that is not funny...a very serious topic...anxiety & depression in a woman...

This Allen film has some pedigree and within the first 30 minutes its clear he has sharpened the pencil well for the writing of his principal character, Jasmine or Jeanette. Later on, with the other male characters who are part of her sister's life, a nagging feeling comes on. This is like...what was that play about a delusional sister and her brother-in-law and the steamy life in that southern city... Oh yes, it was "A Streetcar Named Desire". The template for this is movie is so close to Williams's play that it is well, uncanny, but Allen has form here; with his Bergman pastiches and his nods to Henry James, he knows how to plumb other work- perhaps its all so well absorbed he hardly knows the difference between his own work and theirs. As TS Eliot said, great artists steal. Tarantino does it with everything he has ever done; Allen just appeals to the middle class who don't read the source material and this format flatters their informed sense for what is good drama. The movie is pleasant enough; it falters at times and goes around and around, and has very lazy plotting, it deals a few morals blasts to Wall St and greed, cupidity, amongst other sins, but it never develops well. It's a slight story based on another work. Blanchett is fine, and like the original Blanche, she, along with the author, has often depended on the kindness of strangers. It's nearly a perfect fraud.

Kate Blanchett gives one of the most "Oscar-worthy" performances imaginable in a horrendous film from scene one to THE END. I say that those who extol this film must find staring at dirt thrilling. Alec Baldwin is a philandering bore and should keep to TV. The movie is simply the s.o.s about the wife of an adulterer moving to the West Coast to live with her likewise adopted sister who's preference in men range from dingy dirtbags to dingy scumbags. The story of Kate who was living in the lap of luxury in New York, not knowing her husband was a Madoff style "multi" to a heartbroken one who had to escape. Woody Allen's constant and annoying flashbacks add confusion and his jazz music, perhaps trying to emulate that of the super brilliant "Midnight in Paris" falls flatter than flat. Through all the misery of this movie, one has to be astonished by the artistry, skill, poise and grace of the maaaahvelous Ms. Blanchett whom unquestionably will be an Oscar nominee come Jan.'15. I WANT A REFUND.

All of the viewer reviews I read about this movie were glowingly positive. And with an outstanding 7.9 rating, how could I go wrong going to see it? Woody Allen used to make good, clever funny movies. Big mistake. I'm here to tell you this is an awful movie. The characters are boring, irritating, annoying stupid creatures about whom I could care less. Even the ones that started with some credibility, lost it. The actors all did a decent job of playing the rolls they were given, but the script was uninspiring and the story just lame and pointless. One of the other reviewers mentioned how when the movie ended the audience sat in stunned silence. I took it to mean from awe or reverence. Now I know it's because the movie has no ending. If the projector broke with thirty minutes left to go in the movie, people would be howling with anger and demanding their money back, but if the writer/director leaves out the last 20 or 30 minutes of the story and then tacks on the credits, everyone thinks this is cool and clever and innovative. I feel like a guy standing in the crowd watching the emperor strut down the street stark naked and all around me the people are oohing and aahing over his beautiful royal garments. What garments? The guy is jiggling, hairy, stark naked, for crying out loud! This is not a wonderful movie. It was a potentially interesting story that got lost somewhere along the way. Don't get sucked in by the hype.

What a treat! Cate Blanchett gives a stunning performance as a Blanche-like character written and directed by the most prolific American author of the last 40 years. Cate seems to be an actress without emotional borders. Jasmine walks a very tight rope, her sense of despair etched in her magnificent face vanishes ipso facto when she meets Peter Sarsgaard. She realizes in a sort of disbelief -extraordinary, heartbreaking and horribly funny moment - that he could be the rescue raft in her own personal tsunami. Sally Hawkins, another stroke of genius in the casting department, is a profoundly human creature very much the Stella of the situation. This two sisters, adopted both from different parents are also from different, if immediately recognizable, universes. I could go on and on but I'm not going to, I just wanted to urge you, in this times of 3D super extra loud marvel sequels, to run and see it.

Blue Jasmine is the first Woody Allen movie (aside from possibly Match Point) that I not only didn't hate, but actually loved since Sweet and Lowdown. Allen went back to school and relearned story structure, character development and pacing. Laugh out loud funny from moment one until the end, with the best ensemble by far (they actually seemed like they were real people and not just du jour stars acting in a Woody Allen movie!). Cate Blanchett gives the best performance of her career or anyone else's in a long time (with kudos to her obvious rubric, Judy Davis, who she channels marvelously throughout). And Andrew Dice Clay will make you cry; so glad to see him being used in such a clever way. He deserves this. This will absolutely sweep all awards, and for the first time in over a decade, the Allen crew will have actually earned it!! No more resting on laurels and skirting by on "Well, yeah it had some problems, but that one part was soooo funny/good ..." Hope he stays in the U.S. Clearly it does him some much needed good after his prolonged Euro vacation.

Predictable, obvious, conventional, trite, and stereotypical are words that came to mind as I seethed, mumbling in my seat, watching a film that was "acclaimed" by many critics. Unfortunately this was another Woody Allen writing and directorial disappointment and that makes me angry. I really wanted Allen to embrace me with sensitivity and conviction; to make me laugh and cry, to create characters that were distinctive and demonstrated individuality like he did in the 1999 film SWEET AND LOWDOWN. Instead BLUE JASMINE, which ostensibly speaks about class divide, pretension, financial immorality, and the fickleness of relationships, focuses on a woman named Jasmine played by Cate Blanchett who is in the midst of having a nervous breakdown and moves in with her "lower-class" sister in San Francisco. Cate Blanchett's performance as Jasmine, who had been married to a very wealthy, Bernie Madoff-type businessman Hal (a smooth and slick Alec Baldwin,) living a life as the beautiful Park Avenue socialite wife entertaining, doing charity work, and filling her time with Yoga and Pilates is vapidly inconsistent. We are subject to constant flashbacks of her former luxurious life then, contrasted with her penniless life "now," – before and after the collapse of her seemingly "idyllic high-style" marriage. We are made privy very earlier in the movie, to Jasmine's histrionic and melodramatic fall from grace. Her excessive drinking, her devouring pills with an avariciously bumbling urgency, all dramatic gestures that imply desperation were repeated over and over again - a view of psychic disintegration that was hackneyed and tired – a picture of nervous collapse pigeonholed into burlesque. Personally I did not give a damn about any of the characters...except Jasmine's sweet, good- natured sister Ginger – a natural and beautiful performance by Sally Hawkins who picks "working class" guys as her partners – her taste in men being the opposite of her arrogant condescending sister. Many of the reviewers of BLUE JASMINE spoke about a Tennessee William's Streetcar Named Desire subtext to this film – I think that interpretation is superficial, and another indication of Woody Allen's trivialization of the "rank and file" laborer. Just because Bobby Cannavale (who is an actor I loved in THE STATION MASTER) wears cutoff tee-shirts, is muscled up with slicked back hair and has a temper, does not make him Stanley Kowalski; or a fragile Cate Blanchett descending into her interior world of the past, make her Blanche Du Bois. Instead I saw Woody Allen propagating a boilerplate view of class through dialects and visuals that were imitative and unimaginative. Relationships between siblings, heedless gratification of desire, and the cynical view of the battle of the sexes are always prevalent in Woody Allen's films. I hope I get to see one soon which is genuine, fresh and authentic. I thought BLUE JASMINE might fulfill those criteria– I was dispiritedly mistaken.