Eric on strange casting news. Justin Timberlake will be joining the cast of Woody Allen’s upcoming 2017 film (as yet untitled). He'll join Kate Winslet, Jim Belushi, and Juno Temple. If that isn’t one of the weirdest casts for any movie, let alone a Woody movie, I don’t know what is. It’s funny imagining those four people in the same room together, let alone the same film.
Woody has had the most unpredictable decade, delivering some of his best (Blue Jasmine, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris, Match Point) and some of his worst (Irrational Man and Magic in the Moonlight), and you just never know what you’re going to get...
As Woody has gotten older, his movies seem to work best when he traps a few characters in a hermetically-sealed universe where “real life” doesn’t exist outside of what we’re seeing. Irrational Man was particularly painful when 80-year-old Woody tried to present a believable present-day college campus environment, complete with dialogue nobody would actually speak. I pray we will one day get a Woody movie where someone doesn’t use the phrase “make love” because what creepy person says THAT?
There’s no log line for Woody’s upcoming film at this point (simply “a drama set in New York City in the late 1950s”), so we can only fantasize about what those four actors might be doing in the same movie city. It’s thrilling that Winslet will finally get to work with Woody (she was set to play the Scarlett Johansson role in Match Point before she pulled out), especially since we have her back in Great Actress mode after her killer performance in Steve Jobs. The best we can hope for is that Woody has written her a gigantic role like Cate Blanchett’s Jasmine, where she'll scale huge heights. Dear Mr. Allen: it would be a mega-bummer to finally get Winslet and not give her center stage to climb some walls.
As for Timberlake, there's talent and genuine star charisma but not much performance-wise that exists beyond"showman". His performance in The Social Network worked so skillfully because we wondered how far Sean Parker was from the actual Justin Timberlake: the seductive flash of both is merciless. His other work, in films like Inside Llewyn Davis and Bad Teacher, but will anyone ask him to do some deep-digging.
Will next year's Woody Allen be a Jasmine or an Irrational? What do you make of the casting?