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	<title>Screen Machine &#187; I&#8217;ve given up trying to please you: The intentional crappiness of &#8220;Whatever Works&#8221;</title>
	<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv</link>
	<description>Film criticism and cultural commentary based out of Melbourne, Australia.</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:17:26 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>I&#8217;ve given up trying to please you: The intentional crappiness of &#8220;Whatever Works&#8221;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Woody Allen has never had a problem with the idea of himself in a relationship with a significantly younger woman, either on screen (Manhattan) or in real life. Yet his latest film, Whatever Works, might be the first of his films in which Woody Allen actively defends his position, that is, he addresses his ideas on intergenerational love relationships by satirising wider society&#8217;s uptight sexual morality.

Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm) plays Boris Yelnikoff, a former nuclear physicist who, following an existential crisis, divorces his wife and retires to teach kids to play chess. He has an outsized opinion of his own intellect and a dim view of the rest of the world. One day, he arrives home to find a simple, nubile 21-year-old woman, Melodie, (Evan Rachel Wood) on his doorstep having run away from her conservative family in Mississippi. They’re terribly mismatched but they see something in each other, and a relationship develops. Then Melodie’s mother (Patricia Clarkson) turns up with her own crisis and everything is thrown out of order once again.

Your tolerance for Whatever Works may be determined by how open you are to accepting a relationship that stands outside social norms. Allen pointedly contrasts Boris&#8217; relationship with a healthy ménage à trois and a heathy gay couple and it&#8217;s a successful (if forced) strategy to align cross-generational relationships, so widely regarded as &#8220;creepy&#8221;, with the much more highly-championed gay relationship that has had to fight its way to gain the (limited) acceptance it has today.

Allen is&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/10/23/ive-giving-up-trying-to-please-you/</link>
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