Rating: 
Summary: Spaghetti Broadway
Review: When Woody Allen writes a screenplay about Broadway, it is necessarily explosive. He sees and shows every single little funny aspect of artists, males and females, actors, playwrights and all the others. The women are hysterical, selling themselves not by the pound but by the line, or even the cue. Men are slobs that eat, drink and take adavantage of those cheap but transient women. Woody Allen even adds some Italian maffia in the whole business, including on the stage before the premiere or even during and after. The bodyguard becomes the real playwright and he kills the girlfriend of his boss because she is not a good enought actress. And he then gets executed by the gunmen of his boss directly in the wings of the New York premiere. It is not the film where you will laugh out like a noisy bunch of firecrackers. But It is funny all along, humorous, witty, and the situations are so silly and ridiculous that those puppets that the actresses and actors are become like a bunch of crazy termites turning psychotic by the second and schizophrenic by the minute. The film attacks you in your common sense and simple-mindedness. You used to think that the theater, be it Broadway in New York or Covent Garden in London, was a world of glamour, passion, beauty and style. You discover it is a mean mean mean world of pettiness and petticoats, and you do not know any more if you prefer the pettiness of these midgets or the petticoats of those dwarves. Everyone is so small in that world that you feel like a giant when reclining in your armchair and listening to their rowdy bull. If you had any intention of entering the career, you will definitely turn your coat around and trace your steps back to your armchair and your night-cap. And yet, there is some charm in this crazy folly, and that charm is just undescribable and Woody Allen makes us feel it in the last sad and anticlimactic scene that goes back to the gutter running in front of the beautidul and luminous marquees. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Universities of Paris IX and II.
Rating: 
Summary: Hot Lead
Review: __________________This one never quite took off for me. The setting was supposed to be the gangster era, but Allen can't seem to write dialogue that is either convincing or just funny when he tries to emulate those movies he saw as a kid. This one seemed like an awkward knockoff of "Hannah and Her Sisters" without much of a plot. Pygmalion crept into the film, but that's pretty common in his films. This one wasn't funny enough to be a comedy or serious enough to be a drama. OTOH, it seems to be pretty popular, so you may like it.
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