Woody Allen‘s new movie about 1930s Hollywood features (an actually kind of cute!) Jesse Eisenberg as the Woody stand-in and blank slates Kristen Stewart and Blake Lively as the love interests.
From Rolling Stone:
Jesse Eisenberg plays Bobby, a young man who moves to Los Angeles where he’s taken in by the allure of the movie business. Aside from being charmed by the glamour that’s surrounding him, in the clip he looks to be falling for the character played by Kristen Stewart and he’s also charmed by Blake Lively’s character. In the video, he’s warned that “unrequited love kills more people per year than tuberculosis” and that “Love is not rational. You fall in love, you lose control.”
His uncle, played by Steve Carell, is a big Hollywood player, who imparts this advice upon his nephew’s arrival: “It’s all about ego, this whole town runs on ego.” Later, Bobby admits that he’s “Half bored, half fascinated” by his new locale. True to the era, the video also contrasts the glitz against what looks like some mob action. The film also stars Parker Posey and Jeannie Berlin.
“Life is a comedy, written by a sadistic comedy writer,” Eisenberg’s character concludes in the trailer.
Watch it below.
Any new Woody Allen movie, of course, is met with instant push-back (and rightly so), but I stubbornly remain a fan. I guess it comes down to the old “separating the art from the artist” debate. Loads of terrible people made wondrous things. Picasso, TS Elliot, Wagner, and Ezra Pound were all horrible anti-Semites. Coco Chanel slept with Nazis. Jean Genet was a thief. Flaubert paid underage boys to sleep with him. Even Dickens was supposedly just TERRIBLE to his wife and kids. More recently, Norman Mailer tried to kill his wife, Warren Beatty was a serial womanizer. and Walt Disney was racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic. Nowadays, Alec Baldwin is vaguely homophobic and R Kelly is asexual predator. It goes on and on. None of which excuses Woody Allen, of course. Terrible, terrible man. But goddamn if Manhattan isn’t a perfect movie. And Annie Hall still dazzles. And Hannah and her Sisters is probably the best movie of the 1980s. What do you think? Will you come see Café Society with me?
