Word: allenate
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...lane, no wistful reminiscing about Our Vanished Youth, and certainly no tedious shout-outs to roommates, friends and sundry others. This will doubtless come as disappointing surprise to the merry band in Quincy 616 and 613 (sorry, Alex and Tuttle and Praveen and Brian and Andy and Josh and Allen) and perhaps to others of significance (forgive me, Abby). But standards must be upheld, even when on the brink of the apocalypse...
That seems the case with Woody Allen, 66, whose Hollywood Ending, his 32nd film as writer-director, is now on display. So is a documentary, Woody Allen: A Life in Film, handsomely produced by TIME contributor Richard Schickel and airing May 18 on Turner Classic Movies, along with an 18-film retrospective. Thus Woodyphiles and Woodyphobes alike have the chance not only to hear the auteur discuss his body of work but also to measure the early movies against the more recent stuff. Alas, it's no contest. Youth wins again...
...direct a big-budget movie thanks to the urging of his ex-wife, a studio executive (Tea Leoni in an appealing, intelligent performance). Just before shooting starts, Val gets a case of psychosomatic blindness and must keep his infirmity from the cast and crew. This could be funny if Allen had either the gags to sustain it or the gift of physical comedy to embody it. He has neither, and the film plays like an endless prank call to an industry that passed...
...Ending, most of the men dwell in a vaudeville Valhalla (the three main males are named Val, Hal and Al), while the women are the familiar Woody types, exasperated wife and perky bimbo--all played by actresses who weren't born when Allen wrote and starred in his first movie, What's New Pussycat. Allen's need to play cute with women a generation younger used to seem predatory. Now, with him fully looking his age, it's just pathetic...
Movie critics like to cuddle too; they want their favorite filmmakers to keep making favored films. And Allen has had skeins of terrific movies: Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days in the mid-'80s and the lesser, still pleasing run of Husbands and Wives, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Bullets over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite in the mid-'90s. So, as we near the mid-'00s, can we hope for another blossoming? It would be nice if the Woodman had one more return to top form--an invigorating dose of comic Viagra...