I did get confused as to which Melinda's life I was following from scene to scene sometimes - the tragic one, which often wasn't terribly tragic, or the comic one, which sometimes wasn't terribly funny. Sliding Doors did the different-lives thing a bit better, albeit that its intent and methods were totally different. The central conceit of Melinda and Melinda is a little laboured - over dinner, two playwrights fabulate two different tales based on the same anecdote, with the same central character. Mind you, I've never seen an Allen film that wasn't I caught Anything Else completely randomly on Freeview a couple of years ago in exactly the same way, and I loved it. I'm glad I watched it it was highly enjoyable. I had heard of it but I didn't even know it was on. I'll watch a dramatization of the phonebook if he does it. Then finally, Melinda and Melinda, on the basis that hell, it's a Woody Allen film. I felt it worked far better at making the viewer stop trying to track what was real and what wasn't than Inception, for all the latter's fancy effects. Deeply odd, and the intentionally-muddled timelines were effective at breaking me loose from trying to track what was happening, when. Every time you think you have it sussed, even early on when it's comparatively normal, it throws you with something outright weird, like Hazel looking at, buying and then living for 20 years in a house that is actually on fire throughout. (I had to work to find a place to insert 'metonymy' into conversation when I learned it.) I liked this, even though it confused the hell out of me. Synecdoche, New York - the film that taught me that it wasn't pronounced 'sin-eck-doshe.' I have probably been saved from embarrassment by never actually using it, mind. The urban 'street French' dialogue is even less comprehensible than normal for me - I could follow what the ministers and senior cops said, a bit, but not the gangsters, barely a word. Very impressive, affecting, involving and remarkably pacey. The stunts are amazing and far more effective than any Chinese wire-work I've ever seen - it's amazing, but crucially, it's actually believable in a way that using mad skillz in Kung Fu to violate the laws of physics just isn't. I've previously enjoyed later stuff by Jeunet, Caro or both.ĭistrict 13 - grabbed because I took an interest in parkour a few years back and several people recommended this. I must see La Cité des Enfants Perdu soon, I think. It was weird, yes, it was shocking sometimes, it was funny sometimes, it was unique and very original, but it didn't grab me, I'm afraid. I think possibly the passage of time has robbed it of much of its novelty and shock value, a bit like a fantasy reader coming to Tolkien for the first time, today, and not seeing what's so innovative. Oh boy it'll be 20 years here quite soon. That's caught up on the to-be-watched backlog a bit.ĭelicatessen I've been meaning to see for years, no, decades when I first moved to London all my mates were raving about it - it was the hot film of the last 12 months or so for them then. I didn't plan it, but somehow, I watched Delicatessen, District 13, Synecdoche New York and Melinda and Melinda. I feel somewhat bloaty and floaty after far too many films yesterday.

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