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Summary: wonderful quality humour
Review: with even attractive jazz music. a must see for any Allen or comedy fan.
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Summary: Woody Allen's back and as spicy as ever!
Review: "Anything Else," is the latest from quirky writer/director Woody Allen, famous for his work in the 70s and 80s such as "Annie Hall." This film charts the shaky relationship between Jerry (Jason Biggs, "American Pie"), a neurotic comedy writer, who's developing a bond with a fellow neurotic comedian Dobel (Woody Allen, "Hollywood Ending"), and trying to find a way to break from his needy agent (Danny DeVito, "Big Fish"), and the girl of his dreams (Christina Ricci, "Sleepy Hollow"), but he's not prepared for the storm of hassle she brings.With it's quirky characters, sharp writing, and classy music, "Anything Else" should win over Allen nuts and causal comedy fans alike!
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Summary: Something More
Review: Allen revisits the old romantic themes of Annie Hall and Manhattan with the twenty-something generation. Some of the similarities are tiresome, but the differences are interesting. Allen's youthful persona was very Jewish, in humor and style. The young Jewish comic writer Allen befriends in Anything Else is a well-adjusted, bland, and carefree Jew who snugly feels himself accepted into the mainstream. Allen, the elder Jew, represents the fears and doubts that have plagued Jews throughout the 20th Century, and the discrepancy between the eternal psychological outsider and the amnesiac insider makes for tension missing in Allen's previous films. While Allen seems to be mocking his character's obsessiveness perhaps it's also a genuine reflection of the rise of anti-Jewish feelings in US and Western Europe as Muslim populations increase and the memory of Holocaust grows dimmer with every new generation.
Best of all, Anything Else has Allen grappling with something that can't be joked away. In all his previous films, no matter how dire things got in personal or public life, there was always the defusing, disarming wisecrack. Not so in Anything Else, where literally heavily armed Allen examines the core of fear and insecurity haunting Jews, especially if you're short, weak, and gawky.
Biggs is adequate, DeVito is great as usual, Ricci is very very sexy.
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Summary: If you enjoy smart funny films do not miss this one.
Review: Even if you don't love Woody Allen's films...but... If you don't love Woody Allen's films, at least his romantic period stuff (Annie Hall to A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy),you don't like movies. Go to the couch. Pull out that Pearl Harbour special edition...or Armageddon...sit back...and just let it roll.
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Summary: Allen's Best Work sinc Deconstructiong Harry
Review: It's funny how the one person on this page who likes this movie the least, Yog, goes on to write the logest and most detailed "review". He apparently felt the need to give us a rambling and grammatically deficient account(run-on sentences anyone?) of each character and their role as he sees them. However, the fact that Yog had such an emotional response to certain aspects of the film (i.e.: Ricci's lack of fidelity to Biggs and Allen's Jewish paranoia) seems to negate his claims of disinterest and his label of the movie as an "abortion". If, to Yog, "the most interesting character in the movie is the rifle" then we learn more about him and his failings as an audience member than we do about the movie itself.
"Anything Else" is Allen's best work since "Deconstructing Harry". Although not as good as "Deconstructing Harry", "Anything Else" does, hopefully, mark a return to form when one could go to an Allen film and rightfully expect to encounter witty dialogue and a tapestry of interesting human relationships.
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Summary: Hey, wait minute here!
Review: The reviews I've read on line re Allen and elsewhere (one radio review thought it would be funnier to call him 'the king of thirty box office flops') have been so obviously bias against Allen as a target to point of being a personal attack. I think this movie succeed for its loose and natural dialogue alone. As recent Allen movies go it is fresh besides being witty. Admittedly, Allen as a whole does not have mass or sex appeal. BUT that is to his great credit. I would go so far as to say, after seeing (and owning) around fifteen of his films that Woody Allen is America's greatest living INTELLIGENT CLASSY film makers. He has grown. He has deepened. But one would never know any of this by the vicious attacks called "reviews." On this bases, I would give him the purble heart for kicking against the pricks.
Rating: 
Summary: A dreadful movie
Review: Let me say at the outset that this is the funniest movie I have ever seen in which the comic and emotional denouement is the hilarious recounting of the star's desire and intent to hunt down and kill two New York State Troopers. Mr. Allen advises his comedic writing partner that these cold blooded killings are over a vague remark which might or might not have been about a religion Mr. Allen does not believe in or subscribe to, and which he in fact vociferously abjures. He goes on to say that he's only killed one of them so far, because he has only been able to locate one of them as of yet, and justifies it by asserting that the one he has already murdered was "the most porcine of the two", i.e., the more piggish one. I haven't heard Police Officers referred to as "pigs", even in the most virulent anti-police diatribes, since I retired from the Police Force a year ago! Mr. Allen actually turns in a credible performance. Although he is the film's requisite designated violent paranoid psychotic schoolteacher (how did HE pass the background check??), he seems to be the only one in the film to have any grasp of reality at all most of the time, and his "paranoid ravings" are for the most part merely factual recitations of events and reasonable conclusions based on those facts. Mr. Biggs is so unconcerned about the trooper's murder that he doesn't even bother to pick up a paper to find out about it-I would think that even the New York Times would mention, at least in passing, the murder of a state trooper. The thought that it might be a kindness to all concerned to advise the authorities that the trooper's killer is a homicidal mental ward resident who has expressed the intent and desire to hunt down and also murder her partner seems not to even occur to Mr. Biggs. The most enjoyable moments were when Ms. Channing was singing-at least that was something which was actually pleasantly entertaining. My favorite scenes were when Mr. Allen was equipping Mr. Biggs with a high powered semi-automatic rifle-a 7.62 SKS with an integral folding bayonet mounted underneath a flash suppressor, obviously chosen for its "looks", although it was ostensibly for self-defense, and a smattering of essential emergency preparedness items. In fact, the entire segment in the stereotypical Army surplus store, complete with skinhead clerk and live fragmentation grenades rolling around loose on the counter, was laughable for its cartoonish depiction of an anti-gun fanatic's idea of those who own or sell firearms. A floating flashlight (presumably instead of a flashlight which would NOT float) becomes the embodiment of absurd, paranoid concern for acquiring unnecessary "survivalist" equipment. One thing for sure-whenever anyone told Mr. Biggs that they would not live in a house with a firearm in it, he should have immediately and emphatically shouted ALRIGHT and thrown them out the door! I think he should have done the same for his therapist who refuses to treat anyone who owns a firearm, but maybe that's just me-as Mr. Eastwood said, a man's got to know his limitations, and if I were as terrible a shrink as he is I wouldn't want any of my mental patients having the means to harm me at hand, either. The biggest disappointment of the film was that, in spite of the fact that Ms. Ricci plays a lying, two-timing, promiscuously adulterous, pill popping, coke snorting slut, who takes a new lover once every couple of months whether she's already living with someone in a "committed relationship" or not, she demurely remains covered all through the supposedly wild rutting sex scenes and we never get to see her naked. SHEESH! While living with Mr. Biggs and having sex with most anything in pants that crosses her path, she abuses him and "shoves him away" every time he tries to be loving, for several months, until she holds out the faint hope she may start having sex with him again-as long as when she does so she will be cheating on the victim she plans to move in with next. She is pressured to do several lines of cocaine by her mother (!), and without more than a moment's hesitation not only starts snorting the coke, but starts pressing Mr. Biggs to do it also. I would have said LOVING mother, at least out of a sense of irony, if nothing else, except I can't tell whether there is any caring between them or not-their relationship seems to consist of an obligated destructive genetic connectedness-and that's the most profound, longest lasting relationship depicted. Its pitiful when the most interesting character in the movie is the rifle, and what constitutes thematic unity is the single non sequitur repetition of an absurdist punchline. The endless ennui of characters spouting, typing and acting out nihilistic philosophy snippets out of context will have you looking at your watch halfway through this two hour torture session. There's a lot more to this movie, of course-these are just the high points. Unfortunately, it has too large a budget, the actors and production principals are too well known, and it is too "serious" a comedy to simply dismiss this abortion with a few dry heaves like one would the ridiculous mad slasher trash playing in the next concrete theatre box over. I give it one star because they have the good taste to use a Macintosh Titanium Powerbook for the computer in the film. Ahh, NOT recommended. Don't wait for this one to come to DVD-you won't want to see it then, either! But why hold back-let me tell you what I REALLY think about this movie-----
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Summary: Annie Hall revisited
Review: Remember the last scene in Annie Hall, the one where Alvie sits dejectedly watching a couple of kids run through a rehearsal of a play he wrote about his life and times with Annie? This film feels as if we are watching that play. However, it is worth seeing as last gasp of a marvelous career.
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Summary: Woody Allen Returns
Review: This is a classic Woody Allen film in the best sense. A masterfully crafted movie that references his "earlier funny films" of the 70's. The characters talk and act like people from the 70's. Indeed the two main characters would once have been played by Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, and seem to be playing them down to their speech patterns. Woody Allen appears in the film as an enormously entertaining mentor/muse to Jason Bigg's character. Woody's eccentric intellectual neurotic seems even more unique in today's dumbed down cinematic world. Christina Ricci is great as the worlds worst girlfriend. Many truths of life are revealed humorously. Allen is at the height of his talent thus far. This film is for fans of Annie Hall and the like.
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Summary: Anything Else
Review: The only good thing about this movie was the soundtrack. There was no plot and every character was neurotic.
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