We have just gone to see To Rome with Love, the latest Woody Allen film and if you are one of those types who cannot stand Woody Allen films then don’t go to see it. But if you normally do like his films then you should absolutely should. [Rotten Tomatoes: Critics 44% / Audience 48%]. Of course it’s funny and the non-existent plot is only there as a scaffolding on which to hang out a bunch of jokes, so don’t expect to have the meaning of life brought to your attention (for that you have to see Crimes and Misdemeanors).

But this part was novel. The character played by Allen is in many ways a conservative and the conservatism is not played for laughs. Woody is himself a figure of fun and you do get to laugh at him but none of the laughs are related to his conservatism. Very unexpected and means nothing at all. But it made the experience of seeing the film even better than it would otherwise have been.

Rotten Tomatoes has it at an unheard of zero percent from its list of critics. Audiences give it a 65% which given the biases of the normal movie going public (say 30% ALP, 5% Green and the rest rational) means for those of our persuasion, a movie not to be missed. You only must hope that some money making capitalist dog distributor will actually bring it over. Never did see Part I. Must get a DVD player.

Thanks to Gab for bringing it up in the open thread.

We went to see Promises, Promises the other night which from its title may sound as if it’s in some way related to politics but unless you think a story of adultery and a woman trying to take a man from her husband has something to do with politics, it isn’t really. It is based on the 1960s film, The Apartment, about a fellow trying to work his way up the corporate ladder by letting a number of executives from his business use his apartment for liaisons with women, the main pairing being the head of the department who has promised his latest fling that he will leave his wife. And while the stage production is done tongue and cheek and played mostly for laughs – it is a musical with its feature song, “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” – I found the morality of it quite disturbing since the one person who is portrayed to have been the innocent, almost no more than a bystander, was that other woman who knowingly and with malice aforethought took up with a married man and was specifically carried along by his false promise that he was about to leave his wife and children to be with her. She instead ends up with the man who has loved her from the start in a storyline that is intended to be seen as an uplifting finale which only reminds me how our communal moral compass has shifted and the shifting can be traced back, as with the film, to the 1960s.

There was a time when no one who behaved as that woman did would have been seen as anything other than a moral vacuum and not to be trusted under any circumstances. How the world does change. By the way, Shirley Maclaine played that young woman in the original movie version of The Apartment. It’s quite remarkable how similar she looks to Julia Gillard.

I did my duty by going along to every one of the post-GFC Gordon Gekko greed-is-good films I could find to watch the slagging of the capitalist system in movies made by capitalists, guided as they were by the profit motive in the story lines they chose to portray. I therefore continued this form of psychological abuse by going out to see Richard Gere in Arbitrage which co-stars Susan Sarandon, itself a very bad sign of plot points to come. And I will confess to being reluctant to go but went only because it was described as a “thriller” which is my wife’s favourite kind of film.

What follows is not a recommendation to go see the film for yourself, although I also do not wish to deter you. It gets 85% by the critics at Rotten Tomatoes but only 73% by the audience. On IMDB the audience gives it a 6.9. I would go with the audience at both RT and IMDB which seem to have it about right. It’s not Gone with the Wind.

But why I mention the film at all is because the Richard Gere character is portrayed in a positive way and in all the wheeler dealer stuff which we are manipulated by in the story and in the characterisations, we are made to want Gere to succeed. Gere is no villain – not in the ordinary sense anyway – and while it is hard for me to tell for sure, I would almost think he is meant to be the All American Boy Makes Good. The moral still comes out that devoting your time to such horrid areas of work such as making money is bad for your family relations, but Gere is crafted to show a net surplus of positive virtues.

And just for interest, when I looked the film up the on these movie sites, it is the only one ever to have used the word “arbitrage” in its title. I’m not entirely surprised but it is notable that the term is considered neither so obscure nor so offputting that it can now be used in the title of a film designed for a mass audience.