Very delightful and charming movie that takes to the literal extreme what Woody Allen has been doing throughout his film-making career: investigating Woody Allen.
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Funny, With A Good Cast
Added 2/5/2009
Here's an entertaining crime story set in 1939 with nice atmosphere and colors and the normal Woody Allen wacky humor.
If you enjoy man-versus-woman insult exchanges, you'll love this as Allen and Helen Hunt trade clever barbs back and forth at a rate that reminded of an old Marx Brothers film. Many of the lines are funny with Allen, since it's his film, delivering most of them.
The story goes on a bit too long but overall keeps your interest. The women in here, from Hunt to the office girl (Elizabeth Berkely) to Charlize Theron playing a Veroncia Lake-lookalike are all glamorous.
Dan Akroyd, David Ogden-Stiers, Wallace Shawn and John Schuck are all veteran comedians who know their trade so the movie offers a lot of quality yuks. I'm surprised this movie isn't better known. I really enjoyed it the first time but laughed even more on the second viewing. Silly, but fun.
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TYPICAL ALLEN
Added 4/11/2008
A FUN WAY TO PASS THE TIME. AS USUAL, THE BACKGROUND MUSIC IS GREAT. PRODUCT ARRIVED IN A TIMELY MANNER.
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Woody Allen should be an official genre
Added 11/7/2007
I really do like Woody Allen. He sticks to a basic format and usually doesn't stray to far from it (Match Point being the exception) but you can always count on him, and that's what matters. Sure, he plays himself in every movie he's ever written himself into, but he's just so likable that it doesn't bother me. Many will say he's been been on a perpetual downslide over the past decade and a half but consider how many movies he's put out during that time.
I really liked this one. It was clever, very funny, and had a well rounded cast. It was a period piece which was a nice touch and music to suit that period during the 40's. Woody works as an insurance investigator and when jewls begins dissapearing from homes where he set up the security systems, he is hot on the trail. What he doesn't know is during a dinner out he was hypnotized into doing it himself! Meanwhile, Helen Hunt is having an affair with boss Dan Aykroyd and Woody suspects her suspicious behavior as a sign that she is the jewl thief. A situation ripe for comedy.
If the movie has any short comings it's that it maybe follows the Woody formula a little too closely to the point where it becomes predictable. In typical Woody fashion, he ends up with a girl half his age (I don't think the age of his love interests have increased since Diane Keaton in Annie Hall) after rejecting a smoking hot siren even younger (very similar to Hollywood Ending). Not that it ruins it or anything, just very Woody. Still, a fun movie worth checking out.
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Woulda been a competent send-up of Thirties Screwball Comedies but kidnapped, sabotaged and deepened by Allen's personal life
Added 10/23/2007
This film could have been an all right parody of Thirties Screwball Comedies like Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, etc., but there is too much going on to sabotage this, like Joyce's increasingly aggressive narrative voices in Ulysses, which could have been an interesting enough romance, but for those intrusive voices we keep hearing in his head, which make of it something immortal.
Just so with this film. It could have been fully funny fluff, but for the subtext of Allen's personal life, possibly the actual impulse for creating this very funny but dark film.
We know the acrimonious and excruciating ending of his marriage to Mia Farrow and the incredibly cruel rupture of any relationship with his deeply beloved and only son Satchmo. Thus in this film we see throughout the theme of totalitarianism (including reference to Mussolini and the Chancellor with the little moustache, as well as the extreme totalitarianism of the hypnotist, who may himself be hypnotised under the power of his own mysterious assistant) as exercised against Mr. Allen by the Divorce Courts of Connecticut, but more importantly the theme of two people who deeply love one another to the point of becoming afraid of their own love and need for the other, having suffered great losses and deceptions and trauma in the past, and who thus can only express their deep love for one another under the safety of the deception of hypnosis.
Just as Mick Jagger sang out his need for the Nicaraguan Bianca in Miss You (if you can call that singing), this is Allen's love song for the lost Mia. See it again. View it in this way and you will see: this reading holds up. This reading makes of this film something infinitely deeper than the surface story. See it again and you will see.
Otherrwise we see a film which does not achieve its objectives. Otherwise the elements do not make sense and the center will not hold. Hunt is otherwise too old to be a recent Vassar grad, and without the Mia subtext, what's with all the drinking and smoking anyway? The hateful words between herself and Allen's character CW may be far more than riffing for this film.
The very young Charlize Theron whom the hypnotised Allen character CW walks away from may be a declaration to Mia that he never touched that young girl.
With whom did Mia leave? What man swept her away? Here we see a married Dan Akroyd character seducing the Hunt character while still married. We see Dan Akroyd as overweight as Brando in Apocalypse Now, and simply dull. What would Woody say about the man who stole Mia away?
Otherwise this is Woody's film. He really has very little to play against, and he is best when alone on screen. What does this say about his life after divorce. We really see no convincing spark with Hunt; he is far too old in this picture, which introduces a distracting element of May-December romance (especially after the irrelevant Theron interjection), or do we see here again reflections of Allen's real life with Kim(?) Previn.
Watch him work alone on screen, the long rolling shot stomping down the office hall to confront Hunt in anger, displaying his cinematographer's talent. And one of the funniest scenes in modern cinema is Allen's rooftop escape from the police station, a silent series of quotes from other great physical comedians. His frightened entry through the door echoes Richard Prior with a touch of Kramer. His crossing the roof resembles clearly, as does much in this film, Woody's deep and incomprehensible appreciation of the Bob Hope movies, an appreciation which he here makes clear and effective. His climbing the ladder is nothing but pure Chaplin. Quite a journey through a century of comedy in one quick scene, and pure genius.
Nevertheless everyone in this film feels too old, except for Theron and the secretary whose cat must get fed. It is a joy to see the great Professor Irwin Corey once more, who works hard to save the joy of this film. It is also intersting to observe wandering the office at the opening the actor who valiantly worked to salvage Jarmusch's Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai. Otherwise this is a much darker film than it appears, in which you truly will laugh and will cry.
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Underrated, hilarious comedy
Added 11/25/2008
It appears that not everyone likes Woody Allen films. Well, I can't really
understand those people, especially when the guy makes such vastly entertaining little gems as "Hollywood Ending". It's true that this movie isn't absolutely brilliant, but it's close enough. This one makes for a great double feature when viewed after an earlier Allen classic also about a bewildered filmmaker, "Stardust Memories". So forget the critics who claim that Woody's time is past; it isn't.
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NYC-LA Culture Wars, Part II
Added 2/19/2008
As I noted in a review last year of Woody Allen's classic Annie Hall, that is among other things a defense of New York City as the cultural epicenter American culture such as it is, this is matter that has preoccupied him from early in his career as a director/ writer/actor/comic. Allen is the quintessential New Yorker so one knows where his sledge hammer will fall. In the current movie under review Hollywood Ending that same premise underlies his story line as he, once again, portrays on screen the trials and tribulations of trying to maintain some kind of artistic integrity in the world of Hollywood commercial filmmaking.
The plot here centers on Allen's character Val Waxman, an aging has-been director given another chance by, of all people, his ex-wife getting paralyzed by the prospects to such an extent that he has become temporarily blind. Nevertheless in the interest of comedy and his career (and their careers, as well) Val and his friends con their way through the filming of the remake of a 1940's film about New York City that is to be the key to his comeback. Along the way Allen gets to get his licks in on Hollywood culture, commercial filmmaking and the funny premise that commercial films are so dumb, for the most part, that a blind man is entirely capable of making a bad film, just like most other directors. Interesting film and, as always, full of autobiographical references, Allen's trademark cerebral humor and his extensive use of sight gags. Well worth a look see.
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Fun, cute, well-paced
Added 12/6/2007
Part of the solid early 90s trilogy along with Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Small Time Crooks. Each one of these is a cute, silly, well-balanced story with a weaving plot that resolves with grace and symmetry. These movies are not laugh out loud funny, but the wise-cracks keep rolling as Woody waxes nostalgic and makes fun of himself. I find them very relaxing and enjoyable. This is Woody's last good movie.
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