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As a former New Yorker myself with some understanding of the culture of the City and State from where I hail, I feel I can give an unbiased and honest assessment of Woody Allen's ten billionth love letter to the Big Apple.
And that assessment can be summed up as *fart noise*.
Seriously though, this movie is a god awful exercise in navel gazing and seems to exist for no other reason than to confirm every terrible thing anyone ever said about the East Coast.
Larry David plays a thinly veiled Woody Allen stand in who immediately finds love and sex with a woman forty years younger than him while constantly whining about his life in a way that makes both his character and everyone else's character seem unlikable. David's character in any other movie would seem like an anti-Semitic dog whistle if not for the fact that Allen is himself a walking, talking Jewish stereotype so the most I can say is that the film probably isn't a hate crime against the Jews.
The running plot of the film is thin and annoying but it can be summed up as an insult to both New Yorkers and to Mid-westerners at the same time. New Yorkers should be scandalized by Allen's assessment of their day to day lives as nothing more than a series of hippie/hipster/radical liberal stereotypes who gaze into their navels so hard that it gives them eye problems. While I'm sure there's some truth to these thinly veiled stereotypes, their use in this manner seems to surpass satire and become a grating affront.
Meanwhile, Allen's assessment of people from Flyover states seems to swing between infuriating to disgusting as he assesses these poor, unwashed ignoramuses as both repressed Luddites and easily seduced bumpkins that will abandon all of their closely held beliefs and relationships at the mere mention of the siren song of New York's shopping and baby boomer three ways (seriously, that's literally how one character decides to move to New York permanently). At times, you wonder if Woody Allen has ever met anyone from west of Staten Island or north of Yonkers.
Also Allen's normally tight direction seems to have sat this movie out as he seems incapable of getting a decent performance from normally talented actors like Evan Rachel Wood or Patricia Clarkson. In fact I feel sorry for Wood since this entire film seems like one long creepy love letter to young flesh as glimpsed by an elderly horn dog. Henry Cavill shows up to be his usual, boring slab of meat self because even Woody Allen can't summon up the self delusion needed to believe Evan Rachel Wood's character would remain with Larry David's character.
Generally the whole film seems designed to get a quick pay check and to allow some of Allen's few remaining fans to leave the nursing home for a few hours.
It's just a really bad movie, frankly.
score 1/10
dnlmonaco 18 July 2017
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3757091/ |
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27-2-2021 18:06:07