Review of Celebrity (1998) by Davey M — 17 Mar 2009

A striking opening, and a really, really amazing final act that is everything Woody Allen movies often are and the rest of this movie isn't--touching, heartbreaking, funny, surprising, and thoughtful.

Crammed in the middle is a whole lot of in-jokes for people who know Woody's movies, some kowtowing to Fellini, and a lot of unusual mean-spiritedness and crudeness for an Allen film, slopping together into a rambling and obvious commentary on the horrors of celebrity culture, with a lot of vignettes featuring famous faces--Theron and DiCaprio in particular, both of which fare well.

It might just be worth it for those final twenty-five minutes or so, which belong to a Woody Allen film much better and more incisive and more deeply felt than this one is, but most of what leads up to the finale left a bad taste in my mouth.

Allen is always cynical, to a degree, but it's rare that that cynicism isn't imbued with a genuine sense of feeling--a romantic, nostalgic sense for how things ought to be, or could have been, or the notion that there is beauty to be found in even the scariest of worlds.

Here it's unrelenting unpleasantness, until that very lovely ending.