Review of Love and Death (2013) by Mariano C — 23 Feb 2009

In Love And Death, Woody Allen takes the shotgun approach to joke-making. He fires off such a large amount of jokes in such rapid succession that, regardless of the exact number of hits and misses, the immobile clay pidgeon that is the audience is blasted into millions of tiny, ceramic pieces.

There are definitely jokes that fall flat, but they are outnumbered by the successful ones, and are usually forgotten in retrospect. The film gets its biggest laughs through recurring jokes (his father's prized 1x1 plot of land), the absurd (the unexpicably African American commander in the Russian Army), and clever gags (the Town Idiot Convention, where one attendee amuses himself trying to catch a ball in a cup).

The whimsical dancing with death and parody of Russian philosophical seriousness is done with a neurotic charm that only Woody can provide. Scatterbrained and shotgunning, Love and Death is ultimately regarded as a success, despite it's occasional misses.