Café Society International Trailer (2016)

Trailer for Café Society that was released early to international markets.

A young man arrives in Hollywood during the 1930s hoping to work in the film industry. There, he falls in love, and finds himself swept up in the vibrant café society that defined the spirit of the age.

Production on Cafe Society was not without its drama; this is a Woody Allen film after all. It turns out that the role played by Steve Carell was actually for Bruce Willis, who was there at start of production. Willis was quickly dropped and replaced with Carell, with rumors circulating that he might have been replaced due to some sort of scheduling conflict. Not so! It turns out that Bruce Willis was actually fired after repeated complaints by cast and Woody himself about the actors behavior on set and inability to remember his lines during filming.

If you keep up with filmographies, you might have noticed that Cafe Society is somewhat of a reunion for Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg, who have also co-starred in Adventureland way back in 2009 and the more-recent action-comedy American Ultra.

A sign that premium-content television is taking over, Amazon Studios and Lionsgate have teamed for this latest Woody Allen installment, making it the first movie in almost a decade not to be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. Since he's trying something new, it is also the first Woody Allen film to be shot digitally. The footage so far is very pretty to look at, so we can only expect that went well.

Cafe Society is a Woody Allen film, that's for sure. The cast is impressive and, if you are into Six Degrees of Separation, find a way to connect a recent Marvel film to HBO's True Blood. Can you do it?

But I digress. The film seems to encapsulate plenty of genres including comedy, romance, drama, crime and a splash of film noir. The only thing that is tough to follow is how all these stories interrelate. Each one has its own flairs of charm, but they seem like microcosms of smaller stories that should sooner or later all overlap, right?

Jesse Eisenberg continues to impress. Even surrounded by a cast such as this he looks more than comfortable at taking over the spotlight in Cafe Society, though I'm not entirely sure if he's purposely trying to do an impersonation of Woody Allen or not. There are a couple shots in the trailer where it sounds like he repeatedly exactly what Woody Allen told him (and how to say it) right before the scene started filming.

Looks great, and we can't help but be curious what changes we'll see in the domestic trailer for the film.