HOLLYWOOD ENDING

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen

TRAILER

M

Woody Allen’s great at playing Woody Allen. This isn’t a joke, he’s brilliant, and his neurotic persona is funny, endearing and perfectly-pitched even as the rest of the films he produces crumble around him. It should be – he’s been honing it for forty years. But what if this isn’t Woody’s real act? What if the stuttering, ad-libbing apologetic nonsense was just for the cheap seats, something for the cartoonists to sketch and the idiots to guffaw at? What if his real act was an elaborate, decades long role as a shit film-director making shit-films? And what if he told us as much in a movie?

Well, it wouldn’t be very good. It’d still be lazy, inept, overlong and condescending. But there’d be… Actually let’s stop this, it’s a real movie and it’s called Hollywood Ending. It sees Woody play an aging, heralded director who goes blind during the making of his comeback movie. The film within a film is terrible, but it does very well in France, and Blind Woody lives neurotically ever after.

Allen’s real-life films are still screened at Cannes every year, despite being awful. He’s still held up as a genius every time he attends, and every actor in Europe still desperately wants to be ‘directed’ by him.

So Hollywood Ending is basically one of two things. Either Woody’s laughing with us; he knows he’s a great director, we know he’s a great director, and we’re chuckling at a comedy version of him that doesn’t know what he’s doing. But there’s a problem: this isn’t a good film, because it’s not funny.

Or… Allen knows he’s a hack. He knows he’s terrible now, he knows he can’t direct for love nor money, and he’s made a film laughing at that fact. But again, this still isn’t a good film, because it’s not funny.

Hahahahah.