Whatever Works - Stephen A. Sansom

I really like Woody Allen movies. They're clever; they are often meta-textual, like they reference other movies or talk to the camera (see ode to Fellini's 8 ½ in Stardust Memories' u.f.o. scene); they sometimes make me feel like I'm watching a really heady play at a fringe theatre.

Yet even when I was 18 and first began checking out his movies en masse from Hoover Public Library, I realized there was a undeniable pessimistic streak in Allen's films, like everything must be a downer to be legitimate. They even inspired me to create a (truncated) list of a pessimist's media-musts: for film, watch Woody Allen; for music, listento Pavement; for books, read Vonnegut.

It seems like Allen smashed all his pessimistic tendencies into a single character in his latest film, Whatever Works. Boris Yellnikof, the downbeat protagonist, is a septuagenarian hyper-cynic with a failed marriage, fatherhood, suicide, and apparently a failed career for 'almost but not quite wining the nobel prize for physics'. He however is easy to receive as an Allen stand-in and has an enjoyable wit that is as quick as he is to call one of his eight-year-old chess students a neanderthal.

Unfortunately I only just got

used to his likeable unlikeability when the worst thing I've ever heard popped into the movie and stayed: Melodie St. Ann Celestine's atrocious, inauthentic, insulting southern accent. Basically she's a wayward southern bell from “Meeseeseepee” who left a broken family for the “Ceetee.”

This is where my review ends. Seriously. After listening to her talk for twenty more minutes, we turned off the movie and sent it back to the netflix tupelo-via-santa monica hell from whence it came. It's like she learned her accent from an accent coach who had never been east of beverly hills, who in turn had learned it from an off broadway tour of gone with the wind. I thought that any second she would drop it for the privledged hollywood shallow chitter I knew came natural but it never happened. Instead the movie dragged on with her blabbing about Mississippian 'feesh faystivals' and how 'straynge' New York is. Evan Rachel Wood (the actress) is from Raleigh, North Carolina; she should know better.

So, I have to admit, we turned off the movie. I'd like to know how it ends though. I'm hoping a certain character has an 'ayceedent' that does irreparable destruction to her 'vocahl' chords.

Amen Matt. I'll never watch the Blindside without bitter resistance and earplugs.