"A New York Treasure" --Village Voice

Million Dollar Movie

 

Pauline Kael on Woody’s first trip into heaviosity, Interiors:

The people in Woody Allen’s Interiors are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman.

Interiors looks so much like a masterpiece, and has such a super-banal metaphysical theme (death versus life) that it’s easy to see why many regard it as a masterpiece: it’s deep on the surface. Interiors has moviemaking fever, all right, but in a screwed-up form — which is possibly what the movie is all about.

The movie is so unfunny it’s not even funny. Actually, it’s so unfunny that it’s funny, which is funny because the last thing it wants to be is funny.

4 comments

1 Matt Blankman   ~  Apr 18, 2011 3:02 pm

Odd - what inspired this choice today?

2 Alex Belth   ~  Apr 18, 2011 3:11 pm

Just that I saw this site that reprinted her entire review.

3 RagingTartabull   ~  Apr 18, 2011 4:12 pm

this was one of my least favorite Woody movies. He obviously meant it as a Bergman homage, but it ended up coming off like a second rate aping of Bergman.

kinda like how Oasis MEANT for their albums to be Beatles homages, but they didn't come off quite that way.

4 weeping for brunnhilde   ~  Apr 18, 2011 4:16 pm

Funny I should log in and see this; I was just not ten minutes ago quoting "Crimes and Misdemeanors" in my head as I was driving.

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