September

Rating:
Summary: Allen's Best Bergman Influence!
Review: September is a display of Woody Allen's influence by the Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman. This is an psychoanalytical examination of characters who are constrained to the home of Lane (Mia Farrow) on the Vermont countryside. Through the eyes of Allen, one can scrutinize a wide array of actions taken by the characters that are personified from their self-interests, insecurities and fears. These actions lead to a cyclical pattern of the characters' behaviors that are built on their own view of self. At the end, September will leave with a taste of bitterness due to its self-reflective influence.

Rating:
Summary: A classic film, but not for everyone
Review: This is a film that is not to be view lightly. It's on the serious side, and plays on your emotion and mind. This is a master piece and movies like these are rare nowadays. The film also offers a lighter side of the spectrum with a bit of humor and lovely standard Jazz tunes. It has an interesting twist at the end.

This is definitely a film for mature audiences who can appreciate the complex human nature and emotions and the fragile of human minds. The film is full of intellectual conversations over and over again and if you are not paying attention you can miss out on the lines. Mia Farrow is the best looking of the bunch no doubt and is the lead character. However, as the film progress, I must give the notch to Dianne Wiest for best performance in this movie. Hats off to you Dianne if you are reading this review. Her sets with Sam Waterston are so real that make you forget it's only a movie. Her performance in the set when Sam reach over to kiss her one last time to say good bye will pierce open your heart as she rejects and look away. I often wonder how is it possible to act like this when you know fully well there are cameras and a room full of crews watching.

One minor point though as I find some of Denholm Elliott's dialogues not recorded very clearly. Denholm is a wonderful actor and his lines are beautiful. This is also true for all the actors and actresses in this movie, all performed superb. This DVD is definitely a keeper for years to come.

Rating:
Summary: A classic film, but not for everyone
Review: This is a film that is not to be view lightly. It's on the serious side, and plays on your emotion and mind. This is a master piece and movies like these are rare nowadays. The film also offers a lighter side of the spectrum with a bit of humor and lovely standard Jazz tunes. It has an interesting twist at the end.

This is definitely a film for mature audiences who can appreciate the complex human nature and emotions and the fragile of human minds. The film is full of intellectual conversations over and over again and if you are not paying attention you can miss out on the lines. Mia Farrow is the best looking of the bunch no doubt and is the lead character. However, as the film progress, I must give the notch to Dianne Wiest for best performance in this movie. Hats off to you Dianne if you are reading this review. Her sets with Sam Waterston are so real that make you forget it's only a movie. Her performance in the set when Sam reach over to kiss her one last time to say good bye will pierce open your heart as she rejects and look away. I often wonder how is it possible to act like this when you know fully well there are cameras and a room full of crews watching.

One minor point though as I find some of Denholm Elliott's dialogues not recorded very clearly. Denholm is a wonderful actor and his lines are beautiful. This is also true for all the actors and actresses in this movie, all performed superb. This DVD is definitely a keeper for years to come.

Rating:
Summary: Caviare to the Generals!
Review: This is a tightly-written, well-directed story-play that is fascinating to watch and hard to tear your eyes away from. Of course it's not for everybody, but then neither are the short stories of Chekov, and Woody Allen here captures a wonderful Chekovian mood that can be watched again and again. If you like Allen's earlier, funnier movies, skip this. If you like watching plays and reading Russian authors, give September a try. While it may have been a little harsh for a film critic Roger Ebert to say of September that there aren't many Americans intelligent enough to appreciate it, this is one movie that seems indeed to be caviare to the generals. Pile your turkish carpets on the floor, turn off the lights, open a bottle of dry red wine and enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: from Lives Of The Over-Cultured
Review: Time has been kind to Woody Allen's September, a non-comedic film which met with pronounced critical and popular apathy upon its initial release in 1987. At the time, Allen was riding a resurgence of popularity following Hannah & Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Days (1987), two optimistic comedies that regained the director a portion of the audience he had lost after a series of idiosyncratic Eighties projects, including the brilliant Stardust Memories (1980), the underrated A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy (1982), Zelig (1983), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).

Upon release, September seemed remarkably crimped, reductive, and sterile in a manner in which his earlier dramatic effort, Interiors (1978), had not; and for the first time, Allen's self-cannibalization of earlier themes, plots, and jokes was blatantly apparent. Personal betrayal, a longstanding Allen theme, and one which was soon to dominate his own private and public life, was a dominant story element, as were frustrated WASPS belatedly angling after careers in the arts and anxious characters obsessed with the amoral nature of the universe.

If September was the weakest film Allen had then created, the decades since have seen the director create many more of a far weaker caliber. The Nineties would see his projects become so unpopular that few were given national release, a trend which continues into the present, despite Allen's millennial alliance with Dreamworks. While lacking the cohesive strength of a later-era Allen classic like Bullets Over Broadway (1994), today September views much more powerfully than the fragmented, mediocre Crimes And Misdemeanors (1989), which, like September, was dissembled and rebuilt from the ground up after initially being found unsatisfactory.

In many ways, September, which takes place in an off-camera Vermont, is a dark mirror reflection of A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy, the earlier Allen project also set in a bucolic landscape. Like that film, September also revolves around six characters, most of whom are suffering the vicissitudes of unrequited love, though the median age here has shifted towards the geriatric. Like the earlier film, one character playfully believes that the spirit world is accessible and attempts contact with the dead (in fact, what appears to be the copper "spirit ball" from the 1982 film is clearly visible on a bookshelf in September's closing shots). As in A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy, past violations of morality motivate the behavior of the characters in the present, and the threat of suicide hovers in the air. While the earlier film is appropriately set at "midsummer," September takes place not in September, but in "late summer"--the last week of August.

One of the film's obvious weaknesses is its frequently trite and cumbersome dialogue, and it is to the cast's credit that all of the actors, especially Dianne Wiest, who receives the lion's share of unutterable lines, deliver even the film's most stilted dialogue with an absolute minimum of self consciousness.

Upon release, most of the received critical attention focused negatively on the script's reliance on a scandalous tragedy from the classic era of Hollywood history for its denouement; today, however, it is easy to appreciate how well this episode is integrated into September and how little the film as a whole relies upon it as a device. In fact, Allen's script does a remarkable job of extrapolating the complex nuances of actual guilt and passive aggressive accusation in the pivotal scene.

Elaine Stritch gives an incredible and apparently effortless performance throughout September, but her work in the climactic scene may be one of the most perfect, if brief, examples of understated film acting ever recorded. As the blowsy, extroverted, and tactless Diane, Stritch beautifully combines the two mothers of Allen's Interiors-the first destructive, idealistic, and imperious, and the second vital but "common"--into one highly believable, multifaceted character who projects a shadow across the screen. In the comparatively thankless but nonetheless substantial role of Lane, the emotionally destitute daughter, Mia Farrow gives what may be her best performance in any Allen film.

September, which is scripted like a four-act play and was originally scheduled to be filmed in Farrow's Connecticut home, was shot completely on a studio set; though rain, thunder, croaking frogs, and crickets are heard intermittently, the Vermont landscape is never glimpsed, another factor which initially seemed to detract from the film. But today, especially when considering Allen's banal use of autumn foliage in his next project, Another Women (1988), the decision seems admirable.

Like A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy, September is a small masterpiece worthy of serious reevaluation by critics and the public alike.


Rating:
Summary: Vermont on a soundstage
Review: Woody Allen's 1987 drama was made in the middle of his Mia period and in spite of it's wet anguish, it's interesting to see what Farrow brought to his films, what he did for her and why his post-Mia films suffer without her. The role of the suicidal mousy hostess of the Vermont house where the film is set is clearly wrong for Diane Keaton, and Farrow's real life situation feeds the character - her love of the country, her showbiz mom. Pauline Kael has described her as "luminously thin-skinned" and "weightlessly beautiful with a preternatural glowing sweetness". Her emotional openness and the way she uses her hands demonstrate a delicacy that makes her Lane very moving. When she cries she gives Allen her all. The film recalls Allen's earlier Interiors but is better written. Allen has scaled down the cast to six, though Jack Warden and Denholm Elliott only hover, and reduced the plot to a series of intimate conversations with one or two group scenes. Being Allen he can't help but throw in jokes. I like how Farrow calls her mother played by Elaine Stritch a "human dynamo" and Stritch in return tells Farrow she dresses like a "Polish refugee", and a blackout scene gets laughs when someone declares their "hand is in the gaucomole". He has the rooms of the house full of closed shutters to keep nature out and to conceal the fact that he has shot on a soundstage. He also continues his experiments with framing by having a character talk to someone out of shot, and gives the actors plenty of room to move. Stritch has a wonderful monologue to a mirror and Dianne Wiest acts one decision about the droopy Sam Waterston with her back. Allen had cast Sam Shepard in the Waterstone role but then fired him when he began improvising about the West. Wiest may overdo the hand to the forehead gesture but she works well with Farrow. Interiors was a radical change of pace after Annie Hall and Woody's comedy fans hated it, a situation he used for Stardust Memories. September is in the same Bergman-ish vein and, since I love Bergman and found Interiors very funny, I don't find this film such a chore.

Rating:
Summary: exceptional
Review: Yes, this is an exceptional Allen film that surely isn't for everyone. This film is strong in character as to be Shakespearean...hence the mixed reviews. Many don't understand Shakespeare, and just as many don't understand Allen. If you love plot revelation based on pathos...get thee to a video store!