Woody Allen movies depend a lot on whether the core of his story has a good idea to it. When he has a good story to build around, he can still do good work. But when he doesn't, his movies can become tedious and repetitive.
Hollywood Ending is the latter kind of movie. It's about a movie director (what a stretch for Allen!) whose given a shot to film a movie with his ex-wife (played by Tea Leoni, who is more than three decades his junior) as producer. We never get any idea what the movie is actually about because that's part of the joke. Here's the big joke: Allen's character develops psychosomatic blindness and has to direct a movie where he cannot see anything. But nobody notices! With the help of his agent, a Chinese translator, and eventually his ex-wife, he muddles his way through the entire process and finishes the picture, which is of course terrible.
I can see about five minutes of humor here, but the movie stretches this out for more than an hour. It quickly stops being funny and just becomes annoying. OK, we get it: Hollywood movies are so insipid and shallow that even a blind man could direct one and studio heads wouldn't notice. Maybe you could do an episode of a sitcom with this plot, but trying to extend it into an entire movie just doesn't work.
Worse, the movie tries to support itself with a plot line of Allen re-connecting with his ex-wife. And there's absolutely no chemistry whatsoever between Allen and Leoni. Aside from a cringe-worthy make- out scene, for the most part their relationship feels like a woman in the prime of her life attending to the needs of her aging father. I didn't for a second buy the notion that these two could ever be a couple.
The movie literally has the worst features of Allen movies: narcissism, unrealistic ideas about the appeal of older men to younger women, and a cast filled with characters who all speak like Woody himself. Many of his more recent movies are better because he's tempered these destructive tendencies: he no longer makes himself the romantic lead, and he's allowed great actors to take over their roles and sound less like an Allen mouthpiece. Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is the best example of this.
I wish the movie hadn't pursued the one-joke path that it took. Before the blindness the movie seemed like it had a lot of possibilities: Allen can certainly take jabs at Hollywood culture and the characters are pretty well drawn. He could have had an intelligent satire of Hollywood with well-developed plot lines exploring the realities of trying to interact with an ex-. But instead the movie devolved into a one-joke production, and the joke doesn't work.
Hollywood Ending is the latter kind of movie. It's about a movie director (what a stretch for Allen!) whose given a shot to film a movie with his ex-wife (played by Tea Leoni, who is more than three decades his junior) as producer. We never get any idea what the movie is actually about because that's part of the joke. Here's the big joke: Allen's character develops psychosomatic blindness and has to direct a movie where he cannot see anything. But nobody notices! With the help of his agent, a Chinese translator, and eventually his ex-wife, he muddles his way through the entire process and finishes the picture, which is of course terrible.
I can see about five minutes of humor here, but the movie stretches this out for more than an hour. It quickly stops being funny and just becomes annoying. OK, we get it: Hollywood movies are so insipid and shallow that even a blind man could direct one and studio heads wouldn't notice. Maybe you could do an episode of a sitcom with this plot, but trying to extend it into an entire movie just doesn't work.
Worse, the movie tries to support itself with a plot line of Allen re-connecting with his ex-wife. And there's absolutely no chemistry whatsoever between Allen and Leoni. Aside from a cringe-worthy make- out scene, for the most part their relationship feels like a woman in the prime of her life attending to the needs of her aging father. I didn't for a second buy the notion that these two could ever be a couple.
The movie literally has the worst features of Allen movies: narcissism, unrealistic ideas about the appeal of older men to younger women, and a cast filled with characters who all speak like Woody himself. Many of his more recent movies are better because he's tempered these destructive tendencies: he no longer makes himself the romantic lead, and he's allowed great actors to take over their roles and sound less like an Allen mouthpiece. Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is the best example of this.
I wish the movie hadn't pursued the one-joke path that it took. Before the blindness the movie seemed like it had a lot of possibilities: Allen can certainly take jabs at Hollywood culture and the characters are pretty well drawn. He could have had an intelligent satire of Hollywood with well-developed plot lines exploring the realities of trying to interact with an ex-. But instead the movie devolved into a one-joke production, and the joke doesn't work.