Word: allene
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bullets Over Broadway" is an entertaining picture and a light one, as was "Manhattan Murder Mystery," and probably the best sort of film Allen can make at this point in his career. Gone, at least for now, is the free rein we gave him to try weightier things, lost in a flurry of well-publicized scandal. Watching "Husbands and Wives" was alternately painful for those of us who were unable to forget how miserable he seemed going to court or defending himself publicly, or infuriating for others who saw him as a creep who had gone too far. The spectacle...
This is particularly evident in the movies Mr. Allen writes and directs but in which he does not appear. His sense of life and his worries about it have been so well chronicled that they are by now unmistakable. So much so that in his new release, "Bullets Over Broadway," there are times when John Cusack looks as if he is doing a bad impression of his director...
...Allen (whose own first Broadway play, "Don't Drink the Water," was produced in 1966) is clearly enjoying himself here. Almost all the characters are heavily, heavily drawn, so much so that the film has the feeling of a farce. Shayne declares passionately that he's an artist, that he won't change to pander to the commercial--his goal is "transform men's souls"--and promptly gives away every ideal he's histrionically declared as fast as anyone will take them. Diane Wiest is hilarious as the ridiculous Sinclair, speaking and moving as if she were an alcoholic Lady...
...overly smart, but quickly becomes the most interesting character in the film (largely due to Palmenteri's fabulous performance), a moody genius with a big gun. The intelligence of the script is particularly apparent here: rather than trying to transform Cheech from a hood to an artist, Allen is content to make him an artistic hood, which Palminteri plays to the hilt...
Lightly comic and pleasantly distracting as it is, however, "Bullets Over Broadway" cannot escape the mark of Allen's touch. If his philosophical bent is subdued, his style is not: Cusack bumbles about for much of the picture looking as if he is the slightly stilted son of Fielding Mellish. And, like "Manhattan Murder Mystery," "Bullets Over Broadway" ultimately can't help submitting to Allen's hopeful vision that love can work, that love should work. This vision, of course, must be Woody Allen's; it must be Woody Allen's plea...