Word: allen
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More important, his characters are not the usual musical-comedy creatures. They are your basic Woody Allen folks, a family of upper-middle-class Manhattan strivers--liberaloid, neurotic, mildly dysfunctional. Mom (Goldie Hawn) numbers among her causes prison reform. So, naturally, her eldest daughter (a wonderfully surprising Drew Barrymore as a coolly appraising material girl) falls for one of the recidivists (Tim Roth, in another of his beautifully calculated bounces off the wall) her mother brings home to dinner. This leaves nice Holden (Edward Norton) in the lurch and Father (Alan Alda) fuming impotently...
Circling around this central situation are a younger sister (Natalie Portman) mooning over a high school hunk; a younger brother rebelling by embracing neoconservatism; a senile grandfather; a Nazi-ish maid; an ex-husband (Allen himself) for Mom who keeps dragging his current romantic troubles into the picture; and Julia Roberts, curiously disarming as his latest psychologically bedraggled draggee...
...realizing his deliriously original idea, Allen occasionally stumbles. Some of his transitions are abrupt, some of his jokes predictable. And after nearly three decades, it may be time to revise or retire his screen character. He's too old to keep playing a perpetually muddled romantic victim. But he wears his ambition winningly and, as a filmmaker, achieves a transcendence of his own, making something fresh and beguiling out of that middle-class, middlebrow angst he has so often explored...
Military historians Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen probably wish they had waited a month or so before publishing Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage (Random House; 633 pages; $30). If they had, they could have sneaked in a page or two on the spectacular story of veteran CIA officer Harold Nicholson, who was arrested a few weeks ago for selling secrets to the Russians...
...Woody Allen is notoriously reluctant to reveal much about his movies in advance, but the actors who signed on for Everyone Says I Love You were in for an especially rude shock. A couple of weeks after being cast, they got a call from music arranger Dick Hyman asking if he could send over their songs. Their what? Allen had neglected to tell them that they had enlisted for a musical...