 Woody Allen continues to provoke controversy with his latest film, Anything Else, in which he stars with Jason Biggs, Christina Ricci, Stockard Channing and Danny DeVito. He certainly has his admirers."Anything Else is Woody Allen's best movie in years. Given most of his recent movies, that may not be saying much, but this film has the tang -- if not the overall brilliance -- of his great work from the '70s, '80s and early '90s." cheers Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "What a delight to listen to smart people whose conversation is like a kind of comic music," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. On the other hand, Allen has more than his fair share of detractors. Lou Lumenick's New York Post review is headed "La-di-dull," and he goes on to call the film "relentlessly mediocre ... a pretty arthritic third-generation Xerox of Annie Hall." Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal puts it more succinctly: "Anything Else is awful," he remarks. Like Gillespie, several critics express the opinion that Anything Else may be no match for Allen's early films but is a distinct improvement over his more recent ones. A. O. Scott of the New York Times is one of these. He writes that the movie "feels oddly long for a Woody Allen picture, but its relaxed, casual air gives the humor room to breath, and a gratifyingly high proportion of the piled-up one-liners actually raise a laugh." And Manohla Dargis concludes in her review in the Los Angeles Times that with Anything Else, "the filmmaker has taken a small yet crucial step toward rethinking what a Woody Allen movie can be in a post-Woody world." Several critics point out that DreamWorks, the studio that is marketing and distributing it, appears to be going out of its way to avoid mentioning Allen at all in ads and promos. Roger Ebert tags this final note to his review: "It's as if they have the treasure of a Woody Allen movie and they're trying to package it for the American Pie crowd." |
