'A Rainy Day In New York' (2019) We decided to throw caution to the wind in doing this post, our very first attempt, since starting this blog, to examine a film that no longer exists.....
No long exists? Yes, we're not kidding......ask any of the participating actors who appeared in it......they'll claim they never heard of the film, they don't know what you're talkin' about, it never happened.....
The few actors who'll admit to being in the film do so with the protective coating of having donated their entire fees to worthy charities......
The film itself, dropped like a maggot-infested hot potato by its distributor Amazon, barely creeped into America via a few streaming services......(which is where we finally dug it out from....
Such was the fate of any film pumped out by the once revered but now reviled writer-director Woody Allen, accused pedophile and most famously known as the creepy little guy who married his own adopted step-daughter and possibly sexually molested one of his other daughters.
For a while, actors justified their presence in Allen's films with the "it's all about the art, not the artist" argument. But in in this new incendiary age of #MeToo and #Time'sUp" and extreme cancel-culture, even that excuse wouldn't hold water anymore......and anyone using it might end up cancelled themselves......
Undeterred by his status as Official Cinema Pariah, Allen's output remains as prolific as ever. But the quality of his recent films does nothing to shore up his destroyed personal reputation .....so the whole "its's the art, not the artist" discussion won't work if the art isn't any good either.
'A Rainy Day In New York' is Allen's attempt at a witty, cosmopolitan rom-com ....this time populated not by aging familiar faces, but by a trio of younger stars, the radiant Elle Fanning, the over-rated flavor-of-the-month Timothee Chalamet, and the still criminally underappreciated Selena Gomez,
Chalamet's a disaffected college smartass named Gatsby (honest) who excels far more as a high stakes gambler than a student. He plans for a romantic dreamy day in New York with his fellow student and girlfriend, the bubby, beauty queen Ashleigh (Fanning)......just as soon as she wraps up her school paper interview with a legendary iconoclastic film director Roland Pollard (Leiv Schreiber).
But Gatsby ends up at loose ends in the Big Apple when Ashleigh spends the entire day as a modern day Alice-In-Wonderland, bounced all over town, either entranced, coveted and/or lusted after by the intense neurotic Pollard, his high strung cuckolded screenwriter (Jude Law) and a slick lothario movie superstar (Diego Luna). Gatsby, meanwhile, keeps encountering his ex-girlfriend's now grown up but acerbic as ever kid sister Chan, played by Selena Gomez with the same perfectly dry comedic timing she so ably displayed in the Hulu series, "Only Murder In The Building". Far and away, she's the MVP here.
The three young stars spend the film's 90 minutes spouting carefully composed Woody Allen gag lines clearly meant for older, more experienced actors.......only Gomez, with her sharp underplayed delivery makes these all these artificial bon mots sound anything remotely like real speech....and funny as well. Chalamet rattles off this stuff sounding like it was enough of a chore for him to memorize it all and Fanning's forced to overdo the Miss Congeniality shtick until she's tiresome to watch.
Maybe it's just as well for Woody Allen that nobody outside of film critics and a few adventurous souls like ourselves took the time to view this awkward stillborn movie.......though we will say that compared to his previous film, the embarrassing, unintentionally ludicrous "Wonder Wheel" it's a huge improvement.
And sadly, that's not saying much. 1 star (*) and that single star is strictly for the only star here who shows star quality, Selena Gomez.
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