Woody Allen's A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK (2019)

Woody Allen directing the kids.

People made fun of Woody Allen for naming his main character "Gatsby Welles". In fairness, Gatsby was played by Timothee (pronounced Teem-o-tay) Chalamet, so it was a lateral move for the actor name-wise.

Match Point (2005), about a tennis pro who murders his way into an innocent, unsuspecting family of wealthy British aristocrats, showed that Allen had come to identify with the rich. A Rainy Day in New York has confirmed it. Everyone in this thing was extremely rich. Even the prostitute charges a fortune.

Gatsby's girlfriend, Ashleigh Enright (Elle Fanning), needs to go to Manhattan to interview high brow movie director Liev Schreiber for the college paper. Gatsby goes along for a weekend in the city. Wants them to stay at the Carlyle because they have a piano player who sings "those old Broadway tunes". The boy is a rebel who smokes and gambles, pooh-poohs education and has the interests and enthusiasms of an 80-year-old.

Ashleigh is the only one you can get behind. She spends the day trying to help save the director who's unhappy with the movie he's making and goes off on a bender while Gatsby runs into an ex-classmate and appears briefly in his student film. This brings him into contact with an ex-girlfriend's sassy little sister (Selena Gomez).

Woody Allen has an Asian daughter in real life. He didn't do it for Moses or Soon-yi, but you'd think he'd diversify the cast at least for her sake. The movie is all-white. There's a scene where Ashleigh identifies Kurosawa as European, although she admits he was technically Japanese.

There are a number of scenes in the movie with what they used to call "Dragnet editing". In conversations, they cut to a close-up of whoever's speaking with (almost) no reaction shots. It worked quite well. Woody Allen has vindicated Jack Webb and it's about time.

In one such scene, Gatsby's mother tells him he's old enough to know about her past. It comes as a shock to him. It might reflect something in Allen's family---his children, all adults, finding out about his past, and I'm talking about the stuff that actually happened, not the false accusations.

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