LOOK, I’M
WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.
Starring
Jeff Daniels
M
Run time’s a largely undervalued commodity in
film appreciation, which is odd because it’s the exact time the cancer will
spend eating at your brain, or the period it takes for the dog to bite your
electrical cables back home and burn the living room down. It’s pretty
essential to the experience, and Woody does it well. Most every film here is
about an hour and a half long, and sometimes it’s a blessing, sometimes it’s a
curse, and sometimes it’s like acceptable porridge. In a lot of his pieces
Allen is a breezy, lightweight filmmaker, content to take the simple
entertainment that personified the films of his youth and transplant them into
modern day settings. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Midnight in Paris works because it’s The Avengers for people who eat hummus, whilst Everyone Says I Love You is a drunken scrawl on the back of a
napkin that’s lucky to be on DVD. Neither could grab your attention for much
over the 90 minute mark, but then again, they don’t try to, and everything’s
fine. However, some of his ideas, like The
Purple Rose of Cairo, deserve more than he gives them. The comedy potential
of film-characters chatting to the audience is squandered here in favour of a
simple romance/paranoid delusion, with a likeable Jeff Daniels doing his best
to make us care about a character who’s literally not much of a character to
begin with. Allen never really gets his priorities as a storyteller straight,
resulting in something that you crave more out of from almost the very
beginning; the usual illusions of art and life are addressed here, but left to
hang in a big old meta-mess of escapism. It’s frequently charming and lovely to
look at, with an amazing attention to period detail and the nicked cinematography
of early film, but ultimately it suffers the same fate as Hollywood Ending did when taking the piss out of its useless
director; the reversion to escapism rather than analysis is very clever, but
also unsatisfying. The guy can fuck up, but he can’t play dumb.
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