Continued ...
1 May 2002

SAY GOODBYE TO HOLLYWOOD:  This is one of the most unpleasant reviews I’ve ever had to write.  Recall the old bromide, “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”  And hell, I would never suggest that Woody Allen is pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes.  But when I saw the car wreck that was The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, I just assumed that it was fueled by too tight a budget, some bad creative choices and that occasional Woody Allen screenwriting failure.  When DreamWorks previewed Hollywood Ending, at their shindig a month or so ago, the trailer looked strong.  Great!  Woody’s back!  Then they showed some extra clips, targeted at the Hollywood crowd… and they were all disappointing.  Oh well… clips… who knows?

Hollywood Ending is the most disappointing Woody Allen movie ever.  He has a great cast and a great idea.  But the execution is a flop with the exception of about six gags that really work.  At best, it’s a smiler, not a laugh-out-loud-er.  At its worst, you can sit and watch the jokes develop like they were in the comic version of bullet-time and you can see the construction problems. 

A minor example – George Hamilton plays a classic Hollywood studio stooge, who brutally insults you before saying, “But I mean that in a good way,” with no sense of irony at all.  But perhaps I’ve already given the character too much credit.  Allen does essentially the same gag with the Hamilton character about five times.  But unlike “classic” Woody, the joke never builds.  He is never truly brutal.  He is never quite sycophantic enough.  He’s soft.  Even in a sequence where he chats up an on-set reporter - whose presence is  a lame device made even worse by Allen inexplicably using her for voice over – we don’t hear Hamilton’s patter.  We just see him talking.  Where’s the killer line?  There are three or four great throw-away lines in the film.  But none there?  Why?  And why doesn’t this character ever get to use the really sharp knives? 

As best I can recall, Hamilton’s character’s last joke takes place in a later conversation with the reporter as follows: 

She asks:  What do you miss about Los Angeles?

He responds:  My support group.  I have a support group in Los Angeles.  I miss my support group.  It’s for men who can’t afford G-5s.

Now, the joke there is decent.  In L.A., we have support groups for men who can’t afford their own airplanes.  But why bury the punchline in three set-ups?  Maybe Woody can deliver that and make it work, but poor George Hamilton has no shot. 

Then there is the young girl problem that is getting worse, film by film.  The thing is, there are excuses that can be made and would be made if Allen could see how ridiculous his situation was.  There was a little-seen 1999 film called Guinevere starring Stephen Rea and Sarah Polley.  It was a story about a young girl who was seduced by an aging photographer and it turned out that he had many “Guineveres” in his life… he habitually seduced young women, offering them his mature view of the world, and they would eventually leave, outgrowing him. 

In Hollywood Ending, Debra Messing plays a bimbo quite brilliantly.  It’s a home run performance.  But one of the reasons it works – and she’s only in about 5 scenes – is that she really doesn’t want to be with the Allen character.  She’s there to advance her career and he’s there to have someone next to him in bed.  Outside of pants that zip from the belly button to the top of the butt crack, there isn’t even a promise of any significant sex… just two people getting by. 

On the other hand, the underrated and always great Tea Leoni gives a very good performance as Woody’s ex… but the same lack of chemistry exists.  And that is a plot killer.  I would buy Leoni’s character as another 20-something who fell under Woody’s spell and then left, when she smartened up, but who then reconnects with something sweet and gentle in the man that she missed in her new Hollywood boyfriend.  But that’s just me projecting.  It’s definitely not in the movie. 

But the biggest problem with Hollywood Ending is the failure to embrace the very premise on which the film is built.  What really would happen on a set if a director couldn’t exert any real control due to a bout with hysterical blindness?  I could sit here and give you some answers that I thought were funny or accurate or ripe for satire.  But asking Woody Allen to make the movie I would make is not the point.  The point is that he avoids most of the questions and their answers and, instead, reaches for lame, repetitious gags, like four different people asking him, “Which one do you like?” while holding up two similar objects. 

It was almost as though Allen knew how close the premise of Hollywood Ending was to the brilliant Bullets Over Broadway and went a mile out of his way to avoid the comparison.  The one great on-set character is a Chinese interpreter who is hired to be Woody’s eyes.  His reactions always get a laugh because he reacts in a real way.  The DP screams a lot, but there is no sense that he is ever taking any action… same with the costumer, the prop person and everyone else on the set.  When Allen, still sighted, brings on a production designer who wants to rebuild most of New York, it’s funny.  But why let him go?  Take a character with a grand vision, but then has to be reigned in, but then starts going wild when his director stumbles into giving him free reign… that’s the stuff of high comedy. 

How can you have a movie about a blind man making a movie and never show the dailies?  How can you do this story and not have an editor as a character?  How do you do this story and never let the audience have any real idea about what the movie is about?  There are three actors who get screen time and only one of them has a significant scene and that’s only Tiffani (lose the “Amber”) Theissen making a move on Allen… a move that is telegraphed for no reason by a line of dialogue just seconds before the scene. 

I don’t know what happened on this movie.  My theory is that Woody Allen’s band of friends who helped him stay on track with his scripts have broken up over recent years and there is no one left to tell the Emperor that his clothes are out of date and riddled with holes.  And it’s a damned shame.  Allen did something wonderful with Small Time Crooks.  He teamed up with Tracey Ullman, who could age herself to fit Allen and then with Elaine May, who should have been nominated for an Oscar for her comic turn.  A guy needs to have perspective on himself in order to do his best work.  Woody is now like your 60-year-old uncle who hits on your college age nephew’s date, not even realizing that he’s embarrassing himself.  Worse, he’s pulling his punches, thinking, apparently, that he’s becoming sophisticated in his late years.  He’s not.  Crimes and Misdemeanors is a work of genius.  The mixture of comedy and tragedy was perfection.  But if you are going to do farce – and I think that a blind man directing a film qualifies – do the jokes! 

God, I hope the next one is great and I can dump this feeling that Woody has hit the wall.

READER OF THE DAY:  Sammy “I know nothing!!!!” Schultz writes : “Even though you're down (or at least your page is) i wanted to write to you about kissing jessica stein.  about 20 minutes into it, i realized that this has to be one of the best crafted screenplays of the year.  it was so well constructed and happily the end result reflected that. 

i've heard criticism leveled at the industry because they say that when screenplays are written they follow the same rules or structure.   i think they have it backwards.  the problem is that they DON'T succeed in getting the structure right.  and that is why a movie will suck.”

E ME:  Seems like I am always playing catch-up lately…. What have I missed?  What do you think?