Match Point review

 Number 568 on the top 1000 films of all time us Woody Allen's psychological thriller 'Match Point.'

Spoilers ahead

Christ Wilton (Jonathan Rhy Meyers) is an Irish former professional tennis player who marries into an upper-class English family. However, he risks everything when he starts an affair with his brother-in-law's American girlfriend Nola (Scarlett Johansson.)

Let's start with the Jonathan Rhys Meyers-shaped elephant in the room. Chris Wilton is Irish. It's a big part of his character. It's his nickname at one point. Meyers is Irish. Why does Meyers play the character with an English accent? It made no sense.

Anyway...I have seen a few Woody Allen comedies in my time and I have never been a fan. Judging from Match Point, I'm not a fan of his dramas either. He originally conceived this with an American cast and setting, but after failing to get funding, he reimagined it for an British setting and cast. The only exception was Scarlett Johansson who was a last-minute replacement for Kate Winslet.

Match Point divided critics with the Yanks loving it and Brits hating it. Guess what side I fall down on? It doesn't surprise me that American audiences loved this film; it has everything they know and love about British cinema, or think they know and love: good-looking men like Matthew Goode and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, posh English accents, afternoon tea, London landmarks, black taxis and upper-class people doing upper-class things like clay-pigeon shooting. it was like Allen had a list of criteria he needed to hit, I was half-expecting to see Dick Van Dyke singing about cleaning chimneys.

Allen's script was not good. The dialogue was clunky and unnatural with the English characters speaking in American English - Wilson says he was buying a sweater when any other English person would have been buying a jumper. Never mind a silver spoon, it was like the characters were walking around with dictionaries in their mouth. Plus, the plot was rushed. Chris and Nola have an instant-love connection with no catalyst prompting their illicit affair. neither of their parents didn't do anything to deserve being cheated on, not that anybody ever does, but it did make their relationship even more shallow.

Yet this wasn't all down to Allen. Granted the cast wasn't working with the best of scripts, but their performances were not good. Meyers was creepy, Johansson was whiny and annoying - the two of them had no on-screen chemistry at all, and Emily Mortimer, who played Chris' wife Chloe, had all the charisma of a ham sandwich. I understand that she was supposed to be boring, or, at least, too boring to interest Chris, but we saw little evidence of this, before he starts sleeping with Nola.

At two hours and five minutes, this was Allen's longest film, but it could be have been fifteen minutes shorter. The film culminates in the most half-arsed police investigation ever. After Nola falls victim to the surprise pregnancy cliche, Chris is caught in a dilemma to leave Chloe for her or to keep living his double-life. He does neither. He concocts a hair-brained scheme to shoot Nola's neighbour and then her and then stages the scene to look like a drug-fuelled burglary. 

Despite the flaws in his plan, despite how the ghostly apparitions of Nola and her neighbour appearing (the less said about this the better) appear to Chris taunting him about being caught, despite how Chris carelessly drops a piece of incriminating evidence on the script, despite how the police call him in for questioning, despite how everything paints toward him getting caught, he gets away with the crime scot-free.

One of the policemen solves the crime in his dream and is sure that Chris is lying, but is easily persuaded otherwise by his colleague. It's all just ridiculous. it was like Allen was worried he didn't have enough conflict for the final act, so he shoe-horned in this silly police investigation, which he knew wouldn't go anywhere.

Match Point was like every American's wet dream about British culture. But as is often the case, the dream is nothing like the reality. Tennis is a key theme of the film, but Allen served up a complete dud. A while ago, I wrote an article about films that should not be on the top 1000 films of all time. If I were to write another list, Match Point would surely be at the top.

Sense and Sensibility review

 Number 580 on the top 1000 films of all time is Ang Lee's 1995 period drama 'Sense and Sensibility.'

Based on Jane Austen's book of the same name, Sense and Sensibility follows the Dashwood sisters: Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Marianne (Kate Winslet) after their father (Tom Wilkinson) dies leaving them penniless. To guarantee their financial security, they must marry. Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman) and Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant) are their respective suitors.

In completing this challenge, I naturally watch a lot of films and genres that I would have no interest in otherwise. But I aim to watch these with an open mind. Unfortunately, I have never been a fan of period dramas or Jane Austen. I know...I know, I'm a culturally ignorant philistine, but they're so boring. And Sense and Sensibility was no exception. The characters are so far removed from me that I would never relate to them. And the dialogue was as verbose and stuffy as I would expect any adaptation from an nineteenth century book. Emma Thompson wrote the screenplay and she went onto the win the Oscar. Good for her; in some ways she was a trailblazer for women, like Jane Austen before her. I'm just never going to care about a bunch of rich white people having rich white people problems.

The drama and the stakes were so unbelievably low that there was never any dramatic tension. Nothing exciting happens. Nothing happens. I couldn't have cared less about the Dashwood sisters, so I wasn't particularly bothered whether they went destitute or not. Elinor was slightly less annoying than Marianne who spends most of the film being carried around by the male leads. One point she falls and twists her ankle, but you would think that she's just witnessed a murder. At the end of the film, she runs off into the torrential rain and catches pneumonia causing a big trouble to the rest of the characters. But I guess that's what Marianne is supposed to be like whereas Elinor is more sensible and headstrong.

For me, the one saving grace of this film was Hugh Laurie who had a small but scene-stealing role of Mr Palmer. He and Imelda Staunton, who plays Mrs Palmer, provide a bit of light relief with funny, sarcastic jabs to one another. I say light relief, the film doesn't really need it. It's hardly a dramatic thriller, now, is it? 

I remember when my sisters dragged me to see the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in the cinema. I was so disinterested that I actively slept through the whole film. I should have the done same with Sense and Sensibility. I wouldn't have missed anything.