For the elderly, even the genius-level ones, innovation may no longer be their first choice, and nostalgia is more natural than looking to the future. If there is a train that travels through the time tunnel, Woody Allen boarded the high-speed train back to the past. For viewers familiar with Woody Allen's work, "Coffee Commune" can serve as a sample to review elements of his classic drama, including his usual musings, doubts, preferences, banter, teasing, Chinese food and jazz.
"Coffee Commune" is set in Los Angeles in the 1930s. The contrast between New York and Los Angeles has been set since his 1977 film "Annie Hall", and the key is how to switch to different ways to consistently degrade Loyanniu. In "Annie Hall," the only cultural advantage of Los Angeles is the ability to turn right at a red light, not Manhattan. If Santa Claus comes to Los Angeles with the same outfit as New York, he will definitely get prickly heat all over his body. In "Coffee Commune," if the New York lad needs to lure LA girls back to the East Coast, he should emphasize Broadway over Hollywood. Yes, Santa Monica has a view of the Pacific Ocean, but it also doesn't enjoy the reflections of the many high-rise buildings around it during a walk in Central Park. The protagonist in the movie, Bobby, is from the Bronx, New York. I believe he promised the girl to go back to Manhattan. It’s like when a Beijing boy who grew up in Fangshan attracted a Shanghai girl, he promised, “Beijing is better, and I’m better off with it. I'll go back to Beijing, and we'll go to Xicheng District to buy a house." It sounds good, but in fact it's just that confidence is far more than an implementable plan and an achievable goal.
Love is dominated by irrationality, one of the eternal themes of Woody Allen's work. Audiences who are not familiar with Woody Allen's film ecology may at first feel that the relationship between men and women in front of his camera is quite different from the real world, or even a little confusing. After familiarity, they will at least become accustomed to it, and then they may be able to gain a sense of humanity. deeper insight.
Bobby works for his uncle, Hollywood agent Phil, and the girl he fell in love with in Los Angeles, Fanny, is his uncle's secretary and an important lover. When Fanny finally chose a successful career out of the uncle and nephew, her relationship with Bobby immediately changed from girlfriend to aunt. This change is not complicated at all. In one of Woody Allen's best works, "Hannah And Her Sisters" (Hannah And Her Sisters, 1986), Hannah's ex-husband and sister are on good terms, and the current husband and sister are constantly cutting The rationale is still chaotic, and the pattern is far more complicated than that of "Coffee Commune".
Homicide scenes are present in Allen's work, but even non-comedies like "Match Point" (2005) largely eschew gore. And in most of his comedies, the uniformed cops feel no more serious than the uniformed troupe, and occasionally even feel like the doormen serving the residents of those high-rise apartments on New York's Park Avenue. As for criminals, the experience of browsing Allen's films has taught me that criminals in the world can be easily divided into two categories, criminals with a sense of humor and criminals without a sense of humor. Killers in "Coffee Commune" generally prefer to drop the body into the forming foundation and cover it with freshly kneaded concrete. Murder is anti-human, but the film's cover-up may give the audience some guilt-mixed smiles.
Woody Allen was never a devout, and the film continues to feature characters who complain "I pray, pray, pray every day and never get an answer." As a Jew, Allen seems to have less faith in Judaism than in Christianity. Bobby's gangster brother decides to convert to Catholicism before accepting the death penalty because Judaism does not believe in an afterlife. In Woody Allen's work, the ethnic, cultural and religious background of Jews is more of an object of ridicule, and he doesn't seem to need to take pride in it.
In "Coffee Commune", there is a girl who was not very successful in film and had to be a professional girl first. Bobby recruited her when she was bored. As a neurotic character that appears in most of Allen's films, Bobby was a little hesitant on the spot, and even a large dose of alcohol could not extinguish the discomfort. He found out that it was the first time that the girl received money, so he simply said that he could pay but did not need the service. He didn't expect that it would hurt the girl's self-esteem. Bobby immediately showed great generosity, he could pay and also get service. When he realized that the girl was a Jew, he changed his mind again and made up his mind to let the girl take the money and leave without labor. Jewish identity became a decisive factor in the girl's unearned income.
Similar to murder without gore, professional girls serve more functions in Allen's films than pornography. In Deconstructing Harry (1997), the hero hires a black girl to accompany him to an honorary degree ceremony at his alma mater. In "Celebrity" (Celebrity, 1998), the heroine hires a dusty woman to come to her house as a tutor, trying to learn the physiological skills of maintaining emotions through bananas.
Allen, whose father lived to be 101 and his mother to 96, has been very mindful of his health, spending time on the treadmill every day. It is possible to continue to describe Woody Allen's uninterrupted artistic cultivation with old and strong, old and strong, old horses know the way, old Ji Fuzhen, etc., but no matter how popular the sun is, it is difficult to imagine Allen who still writes with paper and pen and a mechanical typewriter. Being able to incorporate apps on smartphones like Tinder, Blindr, Grindr or Momo into comedy creation, his characters also need to meet in real life to spark. For the first time as a film narrator, Allen's voice in "Coffee Commune" made me feel visibly old, tired, and sleepy. Unable to predict what year he plans to officially call off work, after Hillary's first term? Or use China's time scale to measure, after the 19th National Congress? Even after the 20th?
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