Customer Reviews

Hollywood Ending

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

What a relief to finally see an intelligent comedy without any gross scenes! Of late, comedies have been more and more gross, thanks mainly to the sickening trend set by movies like 'There is something about Mary'. Woody Allen deserves credit for giving us 'Hollywood ending', a film that has some very funny moments.

Woody Allen plays a washed-out film director, whose wife (played by Tea Leoni) has left him for a film producer (Treat Williams). Then this script comes into the hands of Treat Williams and his film company ('Galaxie films') and Tea Leoni thinks that Allen will be the best choice to direct it. She convinces Williams and his friends and then the laugh riot starts! Allen meets his ex-wife and the decision makers of Galaxie films and seals the deal (with some very funny scenes!). Come the first day of shooting and Woody Allen becomes blind (psychosomatic blindness). The rest of the story revolves around how he (with Tea Leoni's help) keeps his blindness a secret from everyone else and manages to direct the film.

Woody Allen is very very funny and steals many a scene, with the best one being the one in which he meets Tea Leoni at a restaurant after he lands the directing job. Leoni supports him very well and Debra Messing ('Will and Grace') plays Allen's new (and not so bright) girlfriend. All the supporting actors are good, with the Chinese cameraman and his translator being the pick of the lot.

Needless to say, the film directed by the blind Woody Allen gets horrible reviews initially, but then there is a twist in the climax that justifies the title - 'Hollywood ending'. The funny moments keep the film up and running and in the end, this is surely worth watching at least once.

I like Woody, I like this film, and I like his love of film. Mr Allen's love of human beings, his compassion and understanding of our foibles, vanities, and his own foibles and vanities, shine through this fine film. I also like his truth - in some ways he his almost anti-Hollywood in the sense that he does not try to cover up his physical deterioration, as if to say " Well, he I am and here you are, and are we going to make the journey with a joke or a whine?" To me, despite the jokes in the film about his character and being a great artist, I think he is one of America's great film makers, and a great humanitarian, with a deep understanding of his art, comedy and us. This is a good example of his work and worth owning.

i was somewhat surprised by hollywood ending. it received so many bad reviews from critics that i went in not expecting much. but hollywood ending is easily one of woody's best film's in years, probably his best film since deconstructing harry.

many of woody's films are autobigraphical, and there's no question that woody is venting his frustrations at the movie industry and the american public when the #1 movie in america is alien vs. predator, and woody allen's movies barely break even in america. but he is still big in france, which he seems grateful for.

it's true that hollywood ending may not be hannah and her sisters or annie hall, but it's woody allen, and it's better than most of the crap out there today. thank fod for woody allen.

Like most of his films of late, Woody Allen's "Hollywood Ending" was panned by the critics, but it's actually fairly amusing. One of Allen's self-described "trifles," it casts the Woodman as a down on his luck director whose ex-wife persuades studio boss Treat Williams to give him one last shot at directing a major film. On the eve of production, he goes blind, a psychosomatic response to the way the plot parallels his personal life.

It's popular to suggest that since hitting 60, Allen's comic timing is off, but I laughed frequently as the blind director fumbled his way across the film set and engaged in conversation while facing an empty seat on the sofa rather than the person he's addressing. The movie within the movie turns out to be a disaster, of course, but it's hailed by the French critics. The ending mirrors Allen's own career these days. Once the fair-haired boy of American critics, Allen must now go abroad to find a receptive audience.

Brian W. Fairbanks

Don't pay attention to the misguided critics of this delightful film. Woody's latest is very amusing, with several priceless scenes that rank among Allen's funniest. Sure, it's not the deepest or most thought-provoking film ever, but it's not meant to be. It is meant to be light, diverting entertainment and on that account it succeeds marvelously.

The recent critical backlash against Woody Allen is predictable but absolutely shameful. Look at many of the other comedies around, look at the shockingly poor standard of their scripts, and then savour the beautiful lines and exchanges in Allen's latest effort. Without resorting to placing 30 year old actors back in college, or relying on cheap gross-out gags involving animals, invalids, bare breasts or bodily fluids, he has written, once again, a smart, witty and enduring popular movie. Those critics who should know better will doubtless continue to chastise him for growing older, and retaining a distinctive style, and not selling out to some dubious money-spinning fashion, and then in a decade or so they will of course generously rediscover and "re-evaluate" these works in a more mature and positive fashion. Everyone else, however - the grown-ups - can simply watch this and other Allen movies now, and celebrate the man's talent, invention, intelligence and remarkable consistency.

Liek many baby boomers and other moviegoers, I grew up watching Woody Allen. From his earliest days as a guest on nightly talk shows to his first movies like Bananas and Play it Again Sam, I have been a loyal and devoted fan. Just the announcement of a new Woody Allen movie in production finds me rushing to rewatch old favorite movies of his like Radio Days, Hannah and her Sisters and the incomprable Crimes and Misdemeanors.

But that said, in anticipation of seeing his latest film, Hollywood Ending, I was a bit reluctant and gun shy. Perhaps it was because the reviews for this movie were rather mediocre, although reviews seldom if ever bother me. Or perhaps it was because Woody Allen's current movies seem to repeat many of his earlier schtick. But I think what really had me hesitating was the failure of Allen's last movie, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, to deliver any of the laughs or humor which I associate with Mr. Allen's movies. But I put those thoughts aside and hoped for the best. Now that I've seen Hollywood Ending and will admit it was better than the The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, it still failed to entertain me with the kinds of laughs found in Annie Hall, the nostalgia found in Radio Days or the pathos found in Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Assmebling a fine cast which includes Tea Leoni as Mr. Allens ex-wife, Treat Williams as a Beverly Hills producer and Ms. Leonis current husband and the ever tan and handsome Goerge Hamitlon as the studio executive, it is as if Woody Allen has borrowed lines and laughs from his former movies. Some work, some don't but the themes of lost loves, selling out, creative art vs. money maling endeavors, psychosomatic illnesses, neurosis and betrayals are just not new and invigorating in this this film.

One might say that even a so-so Woody Allen movie is better than most films today. If thats so, stay home and rent his masterpiece movies and revel in the way he was.

It appears that not everyone likes Woody Allen films. Well, I can't really
understand those people, especially when the guy makes such vastly entertaining little gems as "Hollywood Ending". It's true that this movie isn't absolutely brilliant, but it's close enough. This one makes for a great double feature when viewed after an earlier Allen classic also about a bewildered filmmaker, "Stardust Memories". So forget the critics who claim that Woody's time is past; it isn't.

If you think Woody Allen in the 2000s mean his slow but steady downward spiral fall into mediocre films, "Hollywood Ending" will not change your opinion. The film is not bad, not good either, hovering in the middle of nowhere between the two. It has great ideas at its core, but Allen fails to make good use of it. The actors are all doing best jobs, but the material such as the entangled relations between men and women (or ex-husband and ex-wife) is not fresh any more. In short, 'Hollywood Ending' is occasionally funny, but at the same time is more likely to remind you that Woody Allen back in the 70s and 80s was a real genius.

The film about a film director Val Waxman played by usual Allen's wacky performance. Val is a two-time Oscar winner, but a difficult person to work with (unlike Allen himself, perhaps), so now he is hired to shoot a commercial in Canada. Even that job he couldn't finish, for before he quits, he is fired.

However, because of his ex-wife Ellie (Téa Leoni), who persuaded Hollywood honcho producer Hal (Treat Williams) to give Val another chance, major film company 'Galaxie' offered him a job -- a very big one for Val, who knows he cannot fail this time.

[DIRECTOR WHO CANNOT SEE] But -- here is the point -- when the shooting starts, Val suddenly went blind, owing to too much tension. Hiding this fact from the whole crew except the faithful agent Al (Mark Rydell), Val continues his jobs, pretending that he can see. His strangely nervous behaviors are all attributed to his being 'auteur' for, you know, any great director should have peculiar habits, do they?

Allen's zany one-liners are very funny, and the film's surprise conclusion is a witty one that would please the film fans in America and Europe alike, but the film can never shake off the feeling that it is too long in showing the unnecessary dialogues. Though her acting is good, Ms. Leoni does not look like Val's ex-wife, and moreover, why does she (you know, her character is a film producer) insist on giving her ex-husband a job? Her decision, or the romance part of the film for that matter, never sounds real.

Another problem about the film is that the interesting situation about the blind director is not fully used, and Allen's satire on Hollywood is not particlarly inspired or insightful. To me at least, the Hollywood represented by Treat Williams or George Hamilton looks like the Hollywood in the 1950s, not 2000s.

Finally, as you know, Woody Allen never stops making films. His films are like annual festival to his fans, but not all of his new outings are not, it seems, welcomed now. Remember, we saw hilarious "Bananas," "Sleeper," and immortal "Annie Hall" in the 70s. In the 80s we enjoyed watching more philosophical "Manhattan," "Hannah and Her Sisters," and "Crimes and Misdemeanors." But somehow around the time of "Deconstructing Harry (in 1997) and "Celebrity" (in 1998), things started to look different. "Hollywood Ending" is better than lengthy "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," but compared with the great films in the past, it is still disappointing.

Is it possible that Woody Allen, one of America's last true auteurs if you listen to the French, has beaten deconstruction at its own game? In DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, his frenzied and often ferociously funny 1998 film, Allen's onscreen character Harry Block admits to a small group of college professors that the persona of his novels was in fact, and in the end, himself. The ripple effect of that moment is crystallized by the fact that we see Allen the director shooting a scene written by Allen the writer in which Allen the actor admits a prevailing similarity to Allen the man. In press reports released at the time of the film's release, Allen denied any personal connection to the Harry Block character, saying that the blocked writer was instead based on Philip Roth. He further cited Elliott Gould and Dennis Hopper both as actors to whom he first offered the role before playing it himself. And so the artist again pulls down the blinds between his work and his life (a favorite and recurring motif that runs throughout the Allen oeuvre, as the French and not-yet working film students would say).

Which brings us to HOLLYWOOD ENDING (2002), one of Allen's most recently released films. Its premise sounds promising enough: once-great Hollywood artiste Val Waxman finally gets another shot at directing a prestige picture: the only problem is that his ex-wife Ellie (Tea Leoni) has thrown the deal his way out of guilt, and the studio head Hal Yaeger (Treat Williams) is the man for whom Val's ex-wife has left him. Recognized internationally as a neurotic artist with, as Ellie caustically remarks, "All of the symptoms and none of the disease," Val finds himself stricken with a case of psychosomatic blindness the night before the shoot begins. Faced with the prospect of never directing a Hollywood picture again, Val is coerced by his agent Al Hack (Mark Rydell) and ultimately aided by Ellie to direct the picture blind.

The ensuing complications bring Val and Ellie back together again, opens Val's eyes (so to speak) to the root of his temporary blindness (an estrangement from his twenty-something son Tony, a punk rocker who eats rats live on stage and answers to the new name "Scumbag X"), and accords him further acclaim from French film critics in the face of critical and popular failure back home in the States. Upon learning that his U.S. flop has found favor in France, Val's ironically grateful throwaway line "Thank God the French exist" brings Allen full circle -- the auteur brought face to face with a theory of critical analysis that further legitimizes his creations.

The issue of "creation" is what remains the thorn in my side or, if you will, the blindfold across my eyes when dealing with HOLLYWOOD ENDING. After a love affair with the films of Woody Allen that stretches now over more than two decades, I have to admit that I genuinely dislike HOLLYWOOD ENDING. The maddening thing is that I think I am supposed to not like it.

Consider the playfulness of a filmmaker like Allen, whose recent annual output has been regarded by many (myself included, on most occasions) to resemble meager rivulets more than the vastly rich rivers and occasional oceans of his previous film efforts. Postmodern thinking aside, the films seem to evoke a feeling more of disintegration than of deconstruction. From ANNIE HALL (1977), we go to ALICE (1990); from STARDUST MEMORIES (1980) to SHADOWS & FOG (1992); and, most unforgivably perhaps, from the stunning artistic triumph of CRIMES & MISDEMEANORS (1989) to the criminally mediocre twin package of SMALL TIME CROOKS (2000) and CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION (2001). As time has passed, the jokes have grown staler, comic bits and entire fragments of dialogue have more or less been recycled from earlier films, and the Woody persona has grown increasingly rattled and (yes) old. The only image from these later films that seems to be shooting directly from the man's heart into the camera and ultimately through the projector lens is the image of a skywriter etching the words HELP across the Manhattan skyline in the film CELEBRITY (1999).

Yet what leaps out at the viewer most insistently in HOLLYWOOD ENDING is the director's self-conscious realization that he is being watched, judged, evaluated, and ultimately excoriated by a fickle viewing public to whom he has grown blind -- only Allen himself knows whether or not this blindness is intentional or not. As a moviegoer, you are confronted by what your senses tell you is a good director's bad film about a good director's bad film. The pretzel logic of the complaint becomes the film's compliment: If you hate the film, then the film has succeeded. The Allen persona himself again admits on screen that, "This time, they're right -- the film is incohesive." Is this film's complicity in its own guilt as something bland and mediocre the very core of its ticklish genius? More important for the filmgoer, is this paradox alone worth the price of admission? Perhaps the most important admission to place on the table is Allen's admission that he knows he is making a bad "Hollywood" movie.

Living up to the film title, Val and Ellie reunite and run off to that most prototypical of romantic Hollywood endings: life, love, and art in Paris (witness a similar happy-ending play in HBO's "Sex and the City" series). But what are we really seeing end here? I actually think that HOLLYWOOD ENDING represents the death of the Woody Allen persona as we have known him: a neurotic schlemiel who nevertheless is cool, reserved, and who nearly always swings and scores with a seemingly endless variety of beautiful and progressively younger leading ladies. The disparity of age between Allen and leading lady Leoni is not nearly as painful to watch as the age gap between Woody and Helen Hunt in CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION, but it does strain credibility -- and I think that Allen knows it. The final image of HOLLYWOOD ENDING then shows a limousine driving Allen and Leoni away from the camera and into a future that we are to assume involves airports, passports, and snails. However, that shot lingers long and feels more like a quiet procession in a funeral for the Allen persona as we've come to know him. It appears he's simply grown too old to remain our romantic clown, has grown too bent to bend us to the belief that he can still exist as that image. Just as Chaplin did with his "little Tramp" screen persona in MODERN TIMES (1936), we see "Woody" travel away from us down a road that will take him away from us and away from the screen.

Will Woody maintain absence from the screen? Well, already in ANYTHING ELSE (2003), the Woody character has been reconstructed as an older, wiser mentor type to a younger actor, Jason Biggs. And now in MELINDA & MELINDA (2005), he only writes and directs. However, the movie poster drapes his trademark thick-frame glasses across the comedy/tragedy painting of the Melinda character's face - so he exists now more as film signifier than film character. Looking back a few years later, HOLLYWOOD ENDING now seems to stand as Allen the "auteur" 's full and final admission to all of us that he has gotten older, has changed, and will die, even if the upshot of art is that you live forever in the creativity you leave behind.