Tag Archives: Psychoanalysis

To Rome With Love

There are a lot of characters in the new Woody Allen movie.

At one point in Woody Allen’s rambling, absurdist, vignette stuffed, overflowing pasta dish of a new film, Woody’s character says to his psychiatrist wife (Judy Davis) when she tries to psychoanalyze him something to the effect of, “Go ahead, thousands have tried and failed.”  On the surface Woody appears to be attempting it on himself here in To Rome With Love.  As is such with latter-day Allen flicks, this one is a beautifully photographed postcard of a film, pseudo-intellectual stuff for American tourists, as much a fluffy love letter to Rome as it is a love letter to Allen himself.  But Woody is only psychoanalyzing himself for comedic effect (I suppose that’s the eternal self-loather in him), and in many ways this film is as much a jab at his fickle critics and fans who seem lost in this haze that every other film of his stinks.  Some are clearly better than others (thus is the curse of being prolific) – but they rarely stink.  But if you insist on categorizing this thing, I would say this is at the higher end of the low-end of post millennial Woody.  Yes…I guess it’s just above middling, if you must.

There are a million stories in the eternal city, and Allen – the seemingly eternal filmmaker – finds in Rome a kindred spirit.  Damn his silly old soul if he doesn’t try to tell a million of those stories in a single film.  Continue reading →

Weird Films I Have Seen

Three weeks…three really weird films from Netflix focused on three (or more) psychologically disturbed women.

Where do I even begin?  Let’s start from the beginning.

The Skin I Live In – Pedro Almodovar

Remember the episode of Seinfeld where George was dating the woman who looked like Jerry and Kramer was far too eager to diagnose the “perverse sexual amalgam” and “George’s man-love for a she-Jerry?”  Ah, funny stuff, right?  Good times.  Good times.  Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In is kinda like that episode of Seinfeld only imagine George is a renowned plastic surgeon (played by Antonio Banderas) with a deeply personal motivation for creating the perfect skin-graft for burn victims and his girlfriend is the man who raped his suicidal daughter whom against which he holds a fetishistic vendetta.  Wait…what?  No…that’s not right. 

Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In is like David Lynch’s Lost Highway re-imagined by a hysterical Spanish woman with a gender-identity crisis.  Yeah…that’s it…that’s the ticket.  Or maybe not. Continue reading →

Freedom Fighters

“But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special.” – page 444.

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is an epic piece of self-loathing.

I didn’t read Franzen’s Corrections – the literary cause-de-celebre from a few years back that shot Franzen’s name as a contemporary literary titan into the stratosphere — ahhh…the power of Oprah.  When it comes to writers like Franzen, I like to come in through the side door, read their follow-ups first and introduce myself to them when they are perhaps not at their best.

In Freedom, Franzen introduces us to the Berglunds – the on-the-surface, perfect, Mid-West, All-American, upper-middle-class family living the dream.  It comes as no surprise that they are anything but, and Franzen paints an epic anti-Norman Rockwell portrait of this family from the parents’ teenage days to their children growing up and flying the coop.  Continue reading →