Word: allen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Prosecutors need to be careful when they start tossing around the word love. They make it sound like a subclause in your mortgage. So much the worse, then, when they get to sex and end up like some fidgety imitation of Woody Allen. "Back to the touching of your breasts for a minute," Lewinsky gets asked at one point in her testimony. "Was that then through clothing or actually, directly onto your skin?" The seamy, repetitive questions laid bare the puritanical monomania that infects this mad pursuit: "Would you agree that the insertion of an object into the genitalia...
...addition to the hall of mainstream animation fame. Like the Wildebeast stampede in The Lion King or the ballroom sequence in Beauty and the Beast it is difficult not to be enraptured by this visual tour of the capital of ant farms. As you'd expect, listening to Woody Allen complain about "never being able to lift more than ten times his body weight" is funny, but in Antz, it is the panorama that steals the show. The casting choices made by Dream Works are a good stab at originality in the increasingly stale world of animated blockbusters...
...plot couldn't be more typical. Z (Allen) is one of two individualistic ants in a colony which (like any good super-organism) demands subservience if it is to survive. Depressed by his insignificance, Z follows his heart and breaks the rules to court the Princess Bala (Stone). Gump-style, Allen becomes a war hero and accidentally escapes with the princess, inciting the colony to rebellion by his example of disobedience. As it turns out, the insubordinance is well timed, since the Colony's other individualistic ant (voiced by Gene Hackman), has plans to work the colony to death...
Even if Antz tends to sag in the middle,and is debased by a "moral" so pastiched that itmust be explicitly stated, it is entertaining tosee what Woody Allen and Sylvester Stallone looklike with six legs and shiny exoskeletons...
When Robin Williams enters hell, the movie's visual style lags. Like Ward's heaven, hell is a collection of schoolbook cliches, but without the visual flourish that marked the earlier passages. The hell that Woody Allen presented satirically in Deconstructing Harry is far more frightening than the absurdity in What Dreams May Come. Perhaps no director could reconcile presentations of heaven and hell successfully--David Lynch could certainly do the latter--and in this situation, Ward fails at both tasks...