Woody Allen’s new and ironically titled Irrational Man tell you any philosophical reasoning applied to this thought-experiment is “bullshit” and “verbal masturbation”. Allen hasn’t even released a title for it yet.
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Joaquin Phoenix performs a disaffected philosophy professor, Abe, who has all, however, checked out of life till he meets a star pupil portrayed by Emma Stone.
Stone is poised and thoughtful in her answers, and it’s easy to see how in15 the Arizona native convinced her parents with a PowerPoint presentation to take her to Los Angeles to try for a film career.
“Emma has it all-she’s amusing, she’s handsome, she’s smart, and how can you not like coming to work every morning when she’s there?” said Allen.
Posey, 46, plays a lonely, married science professor who strikes up an affair with Phoenix’s middle-aged Abe, while Stone is a student who relentlessly pursues a May-December relationship with him (a hallmark, and frequent criticism, of Allen’s films).
Judged exclusively on a pain to pleasure ratio, Irrational Man is a delight bolstered by wonderful performances and an entertaining plot.
It’s not unusual to note that Allen has something in common with his protagonist, but here, it’s a case of the filmmaker falling prey to Abe’s thinking: he engages in something that’s a worthwhile intellectual exercise, and finds it doesn’t really work in practice. Alas, Allen’s latest, Irrational Man, is not that good one – in fact, it’s a picture so dire, its problems so base and elementary, that I’m honestly not sure he still has good ones in him.
In that absence of enough direction to make any role intriguing, there are two sorts of women in Allen films-the type who win acting awards as a result of how much they’re given to do, and the ones who exist as young and appealing fixtures in the lives of male leads.
A train will kill 5 people if you don’t switch the track where one person will pass away.
Asked if she would consider relaunching her profile, she said: “I don’t think so”.
“I don’t compare myself to them, but I look up to them in that they followed what challenged them”, she says.
But before turning to “Irrational Man“, the three-time Oscar nominee talked about how interviews can be uncomfortable, and music. He barely has enough steam to get through a typical day. So how is it that Parker Posey had never worked with Woody Allen?
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Parker Posey says Allen is amusing on set, too, explaining that while filming on a cliff that “was slightly treacherous, he’d slide down and grab his hat and kind of hold on to the rocks”.
