The Son's Room, etc

You have these comedies---the early films of Woody Allen, the films of Mel Brooks that came after The Producers and The Twelves Chairs, and lots of others---which consist of a series of barely connected gags. They edit them together and they somehow add up to a coherent movie. Although John Baxter, in his biography of Woody Allen, said that Allen had trouble putting some of his movies together. He had to bring in a new editor to make something out of Take the Money and Run. Someone pointed out that it was almost impossible to write a synopsis of many of these movies.

I recently watched Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room, about a psychologist and his family coping with the death of his teenage son and it was put together almost the same way. Much of it seemed to be series of short, unconnected scenes. We see the psychologist listening to patients. He goes to his son's school---he's in the principal's office. Some Hari Krishnas are walking down the street when he gets coffee in the morning.

It worked very well.

Although I recall Siskel and Ebert attacking a Mario van Peebles movie for being a series of very good scenes that didn't add up to much. It doesn't always work.

And I saw a made-for-TV movie many years ago starring the woman who played Bill Cosby's wife on The Cosby Show. She was really very bad. She played a crusading district attorney going after a deranged plastic surgeon who was attacking and disfiguring models so he could operate on them and restore their looks. It was made up of very short scenes. It got annoying. I gave the impression that the writer couldn't write a three-minute scene. There was a twenty-second emotional break-up with her detective boyfriend who she turned in for planting evidence.