Movie Reviews
Wild Man Blues
I avoided this film for a long time. I’ll admit it, though I try hard not to let the personal lives of artists affect my view of their work, there are exceptions, like Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson and, for a while, Woody Allen. It was just so weird and distasteful for a man to fall in love with and marry his sort-of stepdaughter. (The relationship is a lot more complicated than that. Soon-Yi ... Read more »
Deconstructing Harry
It’s movies like this that make me happy I’m a science fiction writer and not of the “mainstream.” I have never in my life based a character or a story on any of the people or incidents or relationships around me. Woody Allen is Harry, a writer who always takes his material from his life. It gets him into trouble with his friends and relatives, particularly Judy Davis, his ex-lover, who ... Read more »
Everyone Says I Love You
I just purely do adore this movie. The critics liked it, too, but audiences in the US didn’t. It was not a flop, but it was a box office disappointment.
Woody Allen has made movies in just about every genre you can think of, except westerns (and I’d pay good money to see a Woody Allen western), war movies, and superhero cartoon idiocy. This was his only shot at a musical. And he ... Read more »
Mighty Aphrodite
Woody Allen and Helena Bonham Carter are a more-or-less happily married couple who are childless. She doesn’t want to bear a baby (or can’t, I can’t remember) but is eager to adopt. Woody is opposed to it … until he has the child home, when he becomes wildly infatuated with him. But as the boy gets older he becomes obsessed with finding the birth mother. He does, and it is Mira Sorvino ... Read more »
Don’t Drink the Water
This movie is simply awful. I can’t fathom what prompted Woody Allen to do it, except that he must have felt like Stephen King did when he didn’t like Kubrick’s version of The Shining, so he remade it. It was originally a play and it was Woody’s first and it was very successful, running for 598 performances. Then a movie version was made starring Jackie Gleason, ... Read more »
Bullets Over Broadway
It’s hard to recall another Woody Allen film where people actually get killed. In fact, there is seldom any violence at all; people in his films tend to hurt one another with their words, not their fists or firearms. Several people are killed in this one, but it’s not at all bloody.
And it’s definitely a comedy. John Cusack is one of those insufferable playwrights who feel their ... Read more »
Manhattan Murder Mystery
Sometimes a movie just rubs me the wrong way. Woody Allen was going for a “Nick and Nora” sort of story, with a little Rear Window added in. Woody and his wife, Diane Keaton, live in an apartment next door to a much older couple. They don’t know them well, having been in their apartment only once, where Woody was bored out of his mind with the man’s stamp ... Read more »
Husbands and Wives
Two couples (Sidney Pollack and Judy Davis, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow). Close friends. They are going to dinner, but first Sid and Judy announce that they are leaving each other. Mia is freaked out. Sid starts up with a ditsy aerobics teacher (Lysette Anthony) half his age. Mia yentas Judy into a relationship with Liam Neeson. Mia then realizes she has a crush on him, too. Woody flirts ... Read more »
Shadows and Fog
Three major influences here: Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the music and lyrics of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, and German Expressionist directors of the 1920s and ‘30s, like Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene. I like Expressionism, I like the angry musicals of W&B, like The Threepenny Opera (Woody Allen uses much of the music from that ... Read more »
Alice
A sweet little slice of magical realism here. Mia Farrow is one of those useless rich women who spend their days shopping, lunching with other useless women, and visiting beauty spas. The only significant thing she does is pick up her two children, who are naturally being raised by a nanny, from their snooty school. Here she meets jazz musician Joe Mantegna, and they fall for each other. ... Read more »