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Hollywood Ending

Hollywood Ending

List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $13.49
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not Woody's best--but not his worst either
Review: Woody Allen plays a neurotic film director who is hired by his ex-wife (played by Tea Leoni) to direct a film. The film is her brain-child, and she persuades her new beau--who is also the studio head--played by Treat Williams--to hire Allen against his better judgement.

I rated this film 3 stars, and it was really quite enjoyable. However, when rating the film, I scored it against the rest of Woody Allen's work. "Hollywood Ending" does not merit the 5 stars I would give to "Crimes and Misdemeanours" or "Purple Rose of Cairo," for example, but it is worth a great deal more than, let's say "Mighty Aphrodite."

"Hollywood Ending" really reminded me of one of Woody Allen's short stories that has been stretched out to fit the film format. I enjoyed the plot, the humour, and the characters, but found it a little thin.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Glad 'Ending' Ended
Review: Woody Allen was, is and will forever be one of the greatest comediac talents and one of the greatest film makers of our generation and will be honored for generations to come. I've loved or really, really liked almost every film I've seen from him (even his voice-over in Antz was great) but this film should've been cut by about an hour. It starts out in the usual Woody humor and the characters that you get to meet are just as genuine and believable as Woody makes them. He's a struggling movie director who had a vivid career years ago and he's now being offered the film of a lifetime by a film studio overrun by his ex-wife and the man she left him for. Thinking that the film will actually be more about the relationship and the struggle of their marriage, it instead takes the gag of him thinking that he's blind and runs it into the ground. Eventually it becomes as nerve racking as a car alarm outside your door and no one has the key remote to turn it off. By the time you've reached the last 20 minutes of the film, you've waived your right to laugh anymore as the joke just isn't funny anymore and his dilemma is no longer cute, laughable and just becomes, well, stupid. It's a shame that the film itself seemingly dictates this film. In the movie he's directing a film totally blind due to a psychosematic episode just days before shooting and tries his best to hide the truth of his illness so not to blow one of the best deals of his life. You could almost say the same about this movie as he's totally blind to the fact that this joke will eventually get old and because it personafies the entire film you wonder if he wasn't making a joke on himself on this movie. Like he wanted to make a movie that would flop so he decided to make a movie about a film flopping and how it could happen.

By the films closing moments everything begins to take shape and you're forced to accept the end in the time alloted. But frankly you feel cheated that he didn't spend more time on the relationship between him and his ex-wife and not focus so much on this blindness that is quickly forgotten how and why it even happened. After nearly an hour I was almost screaming at the television asking Woody to snap out of it and get his sight back.

Also, some of the co-stars like George Hamilton and Tiffani Thiessen weren't as necessary to the story as you wanted. In the case of Tiffani, she basically showed up just to be a Hollywood ... with no other interaction with Woody or any of the other characters in the film. Her role was not only shallow but seemed to only be there to support the T&A quota of the film. Other than that, her role was not needed and actually disappoints as you want to see Woody make out with Tiffani but instead he fumbles around in his blind state making the overall scene more frustration than funny.

Overall, the film begins to just become an extreme exercise in just sitting through a seemingly endless one-liner that gets old after the first 30 minutes and just mind-numbing after nearly an hour of the same gag.

I would say rent this first before buying it as sitting through it again could be worse than actually paying for the DVD.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: WOODY ALLEN vs.HOLLYWOOD
Review: Woody Allen's latest film is vs. Hollywood,The Audience,The American Mit,The
Industry...Absurd?But isn't that our reality itself?...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Very satisfying Woody Allen film
Review: Work of a tired genius. Any of Woody Allen films are much more satisfying than the best work of most directors.
1. The plot of the movie is very clever.
2. Watching 66 year old Woody Allen doing comedy is not so much fun as when he was younger, but
3. I wouldn't want anybody else to star in this film but Allen.


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