Rhapsodies

So for this week’s them I chose movies about writers and the struggles of all writers who are fighting with the creative process. (Originally I thought I’d go with straight writer’s block but it wasn’t quite as accurate as I would have liked.

The first film on my list, Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, tells the story of writer Harry Block. He’s a bit of a jerk who has alienated most of his family by borrowing personal stories from everyone he knows as fodder for his stories.

Now he’s going to his old university to accept a reward.

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched any of Woody Allen’s film. First, because he’s been cranking them out so frequently, they become more and more ubiquitous. Also as more of Allen’s private life become’s more public, it’s doesn’t feel cool to like his work anymore.

Still this film all right. It has Woody’s usual level of wittiness with Harry as a brutal deconstruction of himself, but at the same time, it feels a little disjointed. It keeps going back and forth between Harry’s stories, the present day and flashbacks. Along with that Harry occasionally interacts with his own characters making it difficult to distinguish fantasy from reality and it’s hard to tell what the film is really about.

The next on my list was the Cohen’s brother’s, Barton Fink. Barton Fink (played by John Turturro) is an aspiring Broadway playwright who after his first successful playwright has been hired to write for Hollywood. Regrettably, his first assignment is to write a b rated wrestling film that is so out of his area of interest he can’t think of anything!

Barton Fink is very much John Turturo’s film. First and foremost the film is a portrait of the character and Tutor does a wonderful job of portraying Barton as an insular, obsessed hypocrite. He continues to go on about writing plays about the common man but ultimately doesn’t seem to care about them. Whenever he actually meets a “common man” he mostly ignores them.

He is supported by the Coen ensemble of eccentrics most notably John Goodman who plays Barton’s next door and confidant, who after Turturro has all of the best lines.