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- [00:04]
A
This summer, serve up the Cookout Classics, Heinz Ketchup and Kraft Singles. Every good burger needs a layer of perfectly melty cheese and thick, rich ketchup. We all know it's not a cookout without Heinz and Kraft.
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B
Study and Play Come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc.
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A
This episode is brought to you by Prime. What if you had one more chance with the one that got away?
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C
Sam, you Came Home.
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A
Based on the best selling novel from Carly Fortune. Every Year after follows childhood friends Sam and Percy as they reunite in the dreamy, nostalgic lakeside town of Barry's Bay. Love can be hard to find. So if you're lucky enough to find that person, never let go. A second chance at first love Every Year After. Now streaming only on Prime.
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hi everybody. I'm Dan.
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B
And I'm Mike.
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C
So welcome to 15 Minute Film. The premise of the podcast, if you haven't heard it before, is that Mike and I watch movies separately. We talk about them on the show for the first time. The idea is to recreate that feeling you have when you're leaving the theater, you're driving home, you're in the car, you go out to eat afterwards, and you just start talking about the movie and all your enthusiasm builds. What we usually do is one guy will see a movie he really likes, text the other guy and say, watch this for the pod. We always say, don't look up anything about it, just watch it. So this week I suggested a movie that I had seen recently for the first time. Texted Mike and I said, mike, you gotta see this movie. Mike, what is it?
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B
Blue Jasmine.
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C
We're doing Blue Jasmine, a 2013 movie written and directed by Woody Allen with Cate Blanchett, Andrew Dice Clay, Louis ck, Sally Hawkins and Alec Baldwin. In Part one, the other guy who didn't pick the movie gets to go first and share his overall take, his overall impression of the movie. So, Mike, I have no idea what you're about to say about this thing. Go.
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B
This is like a remake of Great expectations, but only Ms. Havisham is in it. That she's, she's the only character Somebody jilted, who's been utterly destroyed, has become frozen in time and sort of the rest of her. Her notion of time structures, everything else. I mean, I must say this is one of a few Woody Allen movies that we've discussed doing. I think the second that we've done that is written and directed by Woody Allen, but doesn't have him in it. And I have to say that that's a budding genre for me of movies that I find very interesting because I'm not. I'm not hating on his earlier stuff, but you know, he always plays some version of Alfie in every movie that he's in. That's the Persona that he knows how to do. But outside of that, I mean, this is really, really fantastic writing. And it's even better editing. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie that was this finely edited. It's interwoven like two fingers. Like if you can imagine putting your hands together with your fingers interlocked. So all the fingers interlock of this movie are interlocked. But it still has a three act structure and each act is 33 minutes long. And anyway, it's like technical brilliance with total control that's also not trying to draw attention to itself. And I don't know how else to say that, except this is a really veteran director. This is someone who just gets it, who doesn't have to think about it. It's just like they breathe cinema. There's so many movies that are classic downers. If you ask me about a classic downer novel, I'd say Reed Stoner. Stoner is just like. It's a technically perfect downer. And there's so many movies that received more critical acclaim that are in this same genre of just continuous nauseating, just stomach aches for 90 minutes. But this movie flew under the radar because it's better than all of them.
- [04:17]
C
And it's funny, I thought much the same. One of my notes is that this is a perfect movie. It's a perfect movie to learn how a movie works. It's not like my favorite movie of all time or something like that, but everything it does is perfect. The writing is perfect. Like you said, the cinematography is perfect. I thought the same thing. When she's having that dinner party all in gold, it looks like, you know, she's there with Prince Prospero and everybody's covered in gold. Everyone's like. Everyone's like shining with money. The casting is great, the sets, the clothes. It struck me watching this for the second time Is that if you're a costume director, I imagine it's easy to dress rich characters in a movie. Just get the Louis Vuitton bag, just get these shoes, get that. But to dress people who aren't like that, like, how great is that shirt with a tiger on it that her sister wears? And Chilli's haircut? Like, everything about it looks really great. You mentioned the editing, Right. All the flashbacks are perfect because when you watch it again, you start to see more of how a word triggers the flashback.
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B
Because they're not flashbacks at all. Flashbacks are roughly akin to what music that songs are in. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Right. They're explanatory or declamatory pieces to let you know what's going on emotionally with a character. But this is a person's sense of temporal relevance has kind of broken apart.
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C
Yes. She's unstuck in time.
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B
She's. She's like Billy Pilgrim.
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C
Yeah, yeah, Billy Pilgrim. Unstuck in time. Right, exactly. Because it's kind of like. It reminded me of Arthur Miller once said somebody asked him about the flashbacks and Death of a Salesman and he said, well, there's no flashbacks in that play.
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B
Exactly.
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C
It's exactly what's going on there. So I love it for all those reasons. The casting is great. This is absolutely, you know, a one woman show. She is like De Niro in Raging Bull portraying someone at the end of their rope. Absolutely. Like her, who is great. And it gets to that broken moment at the end with the park bench, which is just like a chef's kiss. Woody Allen knows exactly when to cut to black when she's babbling on the bench at the end. Now it's funny you said that. It's like Great Expectations where it's just Ms. Havisham, which is hilarious. I don't know if you picked up on this. Woody Allen says somewhere that his favorite movie, he says the most well directed movie everywhere, he says two of them. He says Bicycle Thieves is one. But his other favorite movie is A Streetcar Named Desire and this is his homage to Streetcar Named Desire.
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B
Right.
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C
She's Blanche. Her sister is Stella. Chilli is Stanley Cor Kowalski. The dentist is Mitch. And so he. It does all that without being too cute about it. We also should say it's kind of a light hearted thing in part one. It occurred to me that Alec Baldwin in this movie is playing his character from Glamon Gary Glen Ross for an entire movie.
- [06:45]
B
Absolutely. And I mean, look, it doesn't matter how good the supporting cast is, I must say Louis CK Is actually great. Peter Skarsgard is great. Sally Hawk, Sally Hawkins, who I know in my house as the mom from Paddington Bear. She does what Marisa Tomei does in, Like My Cousin Vinnie, but she does it even better. She just totally transforms herself into the party. If I told you that she was born a London socialite and often plays a London socialite, you'd have no idea what I was talking about if all you knew her from was this movie, because she nails it. But Cate Blanchett just dunks on everybody repeatedly. It doesn't matter who she's in the scene with. Like, it is impossible to steal a scene from her. And many like.
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C
And she could act across from Peter Skarsgard or from, you know, the scene where Dice Clay sees them in front of the jewelry store at the end. Or when she's in the diner talking to the two little boys and she's leaning over, like, tip.
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B
Big kids, by the way. You know what's so great about that? There would have been a temptation, especially in the late 90s or early 2000s, to use Hollywood children. Can you imagine how unbearable this movie would be if they had gotten, like, Macaulay Culkin to play her nephew or something like that, or Dakota Fanning? And instead they just get two kids that aren't really actors and they just. It's clearly written on their faces that they know nothing. It's like acting with a really smart dog or something, right? And of course, like. And they say, no kids and no dogs, but she just nails it. She's 100% consummate professional.
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C
And she does it so well as her to push the Blanche dubois thing again. One of the first things she says in the movie after the whole joke when she's on the airplane, which reminds me of the Robert Hayes joke in the movie Airplane, where I guess I'm boring you and everyone wants to kill themselves. One thing that struck me, and it's almost like stealing a bonus moment, is that she gets out of the taxi in the beginning and she's looking for her sister's address. And she says, where am I? Exactly? And that's what the movie's about. Where am I in space? She's in San Fran. But also, where am I in time? And, of course, I could not stop thinking about a favorite song that you and I share, which is, you may ask yourself, how did I get here?
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B
Except the other beautiful thing about this movie is it's actually twice in a lifetime because, like, certain things happen to you, and you imagine that it's some kind of twist of fate. But of course, the beautiful thing about what's going on in this movie is that there's a person that attracts or invites disaster onto themselves. They just want it somehow. And so not only does it have an interlock structure and a three act structure, but it's got a perfect, like, parabolic structure and it's symmetrical on both sides. It's just, it's, it's like a beautiful shape. I don't know how else to describe it.
- [09:21]
C
One final thing in part one is that we've talked about this idea, this hidden genre in a couple of past episodes, but how good of a movie is this? Just a movie for grownups.
- [09:29]
B
It's 100% a movie for grownups. And here's what we mean by that. There are so many places in this movie where something gratuitous could happen. I mean, you can easily imagine the Netflix version of this being 12 episodes long, every character having their own subplot that we don't need to see. There's a part where her sister has sex with Louis CK and it's implied. You can imagine in any. I mean, pick your favorite network. There would have to be something gratuitous that you would see in this movie. It's briefly alluded to, you know, exactly what happened. You know, by insinuation, by dialogue, exactly what happened. Nothing is shown. Everything is only insinuated. I mean, there's actually, for what goes on this movie, there's very little profanity. There's just a skosh and there's almost no sex. It's just all implied.
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C
It's all implied. And of course, if it was Netflix, you'd have things like, well, you would get the backstory of the fact that the sisters were adopted, right? So Woody Allen makes them adopted for different reasons. We could get into like, you know, I kind of thought of Ginger as like the control group. And, you know, Jasmine or Jeanette is the experimental group kind of. But like, you'd get a whole thing of like, why she says, oh, mom liked you. You had better genes, all those things. And you'd get like, you know, at one point we're told that Augie, the guy played by Andrew Dice Clay, said, oh, apparently he used to hit her. You would get that flashback as a gratuitous thing, but you don't need it. Like, it's just, it's put out there and you just watch it.
- [10:58]
B
Woody Allen assumes that you're an adult who's able to follow what he's Talking about who has life experience, which he's borrowing. It's like the mo. The movie has invitations for you to use your own mind to fill in what's necessary. And that the assumption of your intelligence and your imagination means he never talks down to you. That's what we mean when it's a movie for adults. Okay, welcome back. So, of course for part two, we always talk about our key scenes. Dan, what was yours?
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C
So many moments you could pick because it's such a well written movie, right? But here's what I'll talk about now. It's when she first meets Dwight at the party and she's lying to him about who she is. And she says, oh. He says, well, my wife died a year ago. And she says, oh, mine did too. And she says what did he do? And she says she just thinks of something and says surgeon because it kind of fits like her look and who she wants to be. He was a surgeon who had a heart attack. And that of course, it's one of the many, many moments in the movie where it touches the theme, which is about lying, right? And I choose the word lying instead of self deception because self deception is a little more innocent. Like you think you look kind of good and then you see a picture of yourself and you're kind of like, oh, I do have a bald spot there or something like. But lying is a little different. She lies face to him there. She lies to say face. Then she says she's an interior decorator. But it's about willfully lying to herself because you believe you deserve these things, right? So she says in that when they're having brunch with the ladies and she says, oh, I never take no part in my business affairs. And you know, Olgi's like, you, you knew what's going on. How did you not know what was going on? And the reason is because, and I want to push this a little more. She believes what she wants to believe about herself. She doesn't change at the end. She has no aha moment, right? She believes that she, she is of a, she is a superior person with good genes and she deserves these things. And, and, and I'm going to believe what I want. So we, everybody knows. Her friend tells her that her husband was having all these affairs and she kind of just willed them away. She didn't want to see it. A blind person could see he was going to tell he was going to have sex with the, with a personal trainer when he takes her to the Yankee game. She doesn't Want to see it? Alec Baldwin says, twice in the movie, I want to spoil you. Let me spoil you. He gives her the bracelet, he buys her the house. Right. She wants to be spoiled. And then if you push that even more, I thought to myself, well, kind of like other people in the movie do that, too. So her sister kind of wants to believe that Louis CK Is this good guy and that she finds out the truth is that he's married. And Dwight wants to believe she's like this perfect woman. Oh, my God, she's an interior designer. And when I run for office, that whole thing is great. Right? When I run for office, she's going to look great in all my photo ops. And we all kind of believe what we want to believe about other people and ourselves. So they're an exact. She's an exaggeration of that, obviously. But there's a little bit of Blanche, and I think there's a little bit of Jasmine in a lot of us.
- [13:40]
B
Yes, to everything you just said. And so my moment is when she gets out of the cab. This is right in the beginning, right. You know, she's talked the lady's ear off at first. You're led to believe that they're talking about people that they know. Then you find out that they're strangers. Then you find out that she actually started the conversation. Then you find out that the old lady wants to get away from you. And so the pace of this movie, or what the movie tells you right from the beginning, is that part of the joke is, I'm going to give you information as you need it. Part of the joke is that Jasmine is going to be as willfully blind to the reality of her situation as she possibly can be. Now, of course, you ask, how did she get into the this situation in the first place? Which, as you said, is willful blindness. What's the only way to get out of this situation? And, like, you could see how easy it would be for this movie to be a true downer. Like, it's. This is its genre. Like, if you did the Kurt Vonnegut exercise of the trajectory of the character would be just a downward arrow, like Streetcarni of Desire. Right. But it doesn't feel like a downward arrow because it's really funny. Like, imagine that this was a movie about a golden retriever instead of about a person. It would be a horrible movie. You know, you're pampered and spoiled by somebody who just wants to keep you. Then something bad happens to them. Then you have to go live with somebody else, and finally, you end up living in a cardboard box on the street. It would be horrible. And Woody Allen knows that, and so he keeps building in jokes. But part of the joke has to be drawing your attention to the main thing. So when she gets out of the taxi cab at her sister's place, she has no idea where she is. She doesn't know that people live over stores. So the first confusion is, like, there's a door that looks like a store. And she's like, does. Does she live in the store? I don't understand. The other joke is she assumes that the cab driver, he's like a livery driver to her. He's supposed to get out, open the door for her, take the bags out. Somebody else has paid him, you know. You know, when she draws the bills out, she just draws out too much, and he says, oh, thank you very much. She has no idea where money comes from. And so this. This willful blindness is both her weakness and it's her best characterization, which is there's something beautiful about that, because nothing needs to be added to her for this to be made funny. She just has to be her true, authentic self, which, of course, it's Cate Blanchett pretending to be someone else. It's just so beautiful that none of the jokes have to be extra. There's no real gags or knee slappers.
- [15:59]
C
There's no knee slappers in this movie.
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B
There's no knee slappers and there's no gags. This is. And there's no setups. It's just perfect characterization. It's like watching Mr. Bean or something. There's nothing actually funny about Mr. Bean. It's just he does things funny. And there's nothing funny about Jasmine. She just does things funny. She doesn't quite get it.
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C
She doesn't quite get it. And that's why, to build upon your chat Taxi moment, she says at one point when she's on the street, I think she says, can I have some privacy, please?
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B
Isn't that great?
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C
She's used to talking to people that way.
- [16:30]
B
Okay. The Fish out of Water is like the third oldest plot in humanity. And I think the substance of art is to do those kinds of things but not get caught. And Woody Allen, unless we, like, actually did a podcast about it and sat down and talked about it. He just gets away with it for 90 minutes. You can't catch him. Welcome back. So in Part three, we always talk about the title or the ending or the key takeaways. Dan, what do you make of the ending?
- [16:58]
C
I love this movie because it has two endings. It ends twice. You get an ending for each sister. So we could do the happy ending and then the other ending. The first ending is that she reunites with Chilli, who, by the way, great name for him. Great name, great haircut. Chilli. The scene in the supermarket is great. When he starts curt, the guy goes up a tissue.
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B
He says, do you want to sit in my office? And he says, no, but thank you very much.
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C
So good. So good, right? So I love the edit the movie. So they have their champagne. They have no idea that she's had her nervous breakdown after she saw her stepson. And Chilli says, don't even think about taking that piece of pizza. That's my last slice of pizza. And she just kind of starts eating it. And when that happens, as an audience member, you can't help but grin because you're happy that they're back together. He chases her around in the room for the piece of pizza. Now that's going on. That's her ending. She's not going to pretend to be somebody else. She's not going to run off with Louis CK the sound salesman. She's there with Chilli, and we're happy for them because they found each other and they're going to be happy. She, of course, though, takes a shower and goes back to square one, or square minus one, where she's on the park bench. Like she tells the boy, they found her the first time and gave her Edison's medicine. And she sits there totally washed out on the bench and starts muttering and says, oh, you know my jewelry, how I used to get them at auction. The French au pair. And then she hears Blue Moon, which of course comes up on the soundtrack. What's going on in her head? And she says, oh, I used to know the words. Now they're all a jumble. And that's the last line. Now they're all a jumble. So what we said before about the non flashbacks is that everything, you know, the time is out of joint, everything is one big gumbo at the end, and then it just stops. And that's like such a perfect. As soon as the black screen comes on, I was like, oh, that's like perfect.
- [18:39]
B
It does something that I can really only say Magnolia does, which is it uses music that is diegetic and non diegetic at the same time because the characters can participate in it. So it would be impossible to say whether it's where it is in the diegesis. Because if we're just living in her consciousness moving back and forth, although narratively by how much information we have, we're being propulsed forward. It's impossible to say whether it's real or not, because it's real to her. It's something that she's hearing.
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C
So what did you make of the ending or the title?
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B
The title is interesting because, of course, Blue Moon is the song that she heard when her husband swept her off her feet, but it's also when she became Jasmine. So she. She was raised as Jeanette and she comes up with a fancier name so that she can inhabit the character that's been laid out for her. And I just. It's. It's beautiful. Like a set of those Russian dolls is beautiful because, of course, Jasmine is Jeanette is Cate Blanchett. And so the real question is, you know, sometimes you can see through it and you. It's like a Michelle Williams performance or something where even in the middle of it, you're totally sucked in. But there's a little corner of your brain that realizes that you're just watching somebody give an outstanding once in a lifetime performance. But of course, she's also playing a character who's playing a character who's playing
- [20:00]
C
a character you don't know where. Like, you know, how much can you peel that onion? I think that the title is interesting because it's, of course, you know, she is blue at the end in the sense of, you know, blue moon and you saw me standing alone. But that's. So the song is romantic and it's about longing. But of course, in Blue Moon, you know, the singer finds somebody. But here, of course, it's just horribly ironic and it's just so much better that she ends up on the park bench like Aqualung, just sitting there. There's nothing else to say about it like that. And at the end, of course, Streetcar, you know, Blanche goes off to the asylum after Stanley's attacked her, and she's going to depend on the kindness of strangers. But we don't know what's going to happen to Jasmine.
- [20:35]
B
The movie certainly ends at the point it's like, imagine the movie is daring itself. It's like in a nosedive, and it has to pull up at the right second. It's like, I'm going to show you the most utterly crushing thing. As long as it's still funny and we get right. You get right to the point where the narrative universe collapses, there's no way to make it sadder and make it funny at the same time. And that's why I think it ends on purpose. So it's one of those movies that doesn't really end.
- [21:01]
C
It just, it just stops. It just stops. And it stops at just the right moment. Right? Because she's gone back to where the two little kids say at one point, is it true they found. She's like, yeah, they found me in the street talking to myself. And of course, as the movie goes on, you see her do that more and more often until she finally goes full into. To fall into her other dream world.
- [21:18]
B
But I don't want to undersell it. I mean, if you're going to watch a movie with your, with your wife or your husband or something this weekend and you have 90 minutes and the kids are asleep, I mean, you will laugh out loud. Like the, the characters are unbelievable and it's just, you don't have to appreciate it for as a piece of film. It, because it actually works as a movie. It is, it is an entertaining, absorbing universe, which is a good use of 90 minutes. And that's. That seems to be the Alan formula for movies that he's not in as himself.
- [21:46]
C
Thanks for listening, everybody. We hope you enjoyed our conversation about Blue Jasmine. You could follow us on Substack. I'm aagesandframes and how about you, Mike?
- [21:53]
B
The Grumblers Almanac.
- [21:54]
C
Send us requests, let us know what to watch next. Thanks for listening, everybody.
- [21:57]
B
We'll see you next time.