Not Another Woody Allen Movie

The latest Woody Allen feature Anything Else is garnering considerably more attention than most of his recent efforts, with some generally positive reviews, and an ad campaign that wisely tends to show as many images as possible of Christina Ricci in underwear instead of the typical images of Allen futzing and putzing about. I'm not much of an Allen fan, though I admit he can be a genius when the mood strikes him, and it seems this one may be decent, with Allen removing himself as the romantic lead in favour of Jason Biggs, who is in love with a neurotic and manipulative beauty, played by Ricci.

(Aside: fem-crits, before you gather your arsenal of pejoratives like 'misogynistic' to attack the script prematurely, suffice it to say that there are many, many, many women like Amanda-- the Ricci character, the archetypal Girl From Hell-- in the real world, and to think otherwise is little more than idealistic, or sexually narcissistic, denial. Kudos to Allen for daring to write such a comic figure in these everso PC times. Such archetypes exist because they have existed, and do exist, in reality: deal with it. Deal with it just as men have to deal with the equally unflattering archetypes of the infatiguably stupid male and the cheating, wife-beating bastard that too have their geneses in equally unfortunate realities.)

All in all, the movie looks clever and funny, with a great cast that includes Stockard Channing, Danny DeVito and Jimmy Fallon, and it has won praise from some very disparate critical corners. Click here for a review from the Times. Looks like it may be worth a return to Allen-- if only to see the impossibly adorable Ricci, a strong actress with the loveliest manipulative doe-eyes of her generation, play an archetype all but forbidden in movies these days. And any movie that lets Stockard Channing do her thing has to have something going for it.