What's In A Name, Woody Allen?

[In a recent introduction to this new series, a series based on short film reviews for films that deserve short reviews if not just a thumb’s up or down I noted that Allan Jackson, the deposed previous site manager, required his film reviewers to write endlessly about the film giving the material an almost cinema studies academic journal take on it. That caused a serious decline in the number of reviews over the years which I hope to make up with a flurry of snap reviews for busy people. To see in full why check the archives for November 28, 2018- Not Ready For Prime Time But Ready For Some Freaking Kind Of Review Film Reviews To Keep The Writers Busy And Not Plotting Cabals Against The Site Manager-Introduction To The New Series Greg Green]

DVD REVIEW

Zelig, Woody Allen, 1983

Trying to figure out a header for this review epitomizes the problems that I have with this very middling Woody Allen film. Readers of this space know that I have done many reviews of Allen’s films, as actor, director or both but this one annoys me no end. In short, not all Woody Allen movies are created equal. The premise behind this one is potentially interesting, perhaps more so today than when the film was originally produced- a send up of our celebrity-crazed society. With Allen as a human chameleon in the Jazz Age there certainly were possibilities for a funny look at how the geeks looked at a fellow geek but it falls flat. Why? I believe that here Allen just went back and found every sign gag and cliché that he had already used in many previous films- the obligatory nod (or is it finger?) to Freud, Marx, the New York intelligentsia (here Irving Howe of Dystenary fame and Susan Sontag), Jewish childhoods, fascination with gentile women (here Mia Farrow, as an chain smoking experimental psychiatrist) and so forth. If this list sounds familiar to Allen fans then you have the sense of my feelings on this film. Woody flat ran out of steam on this one. Fortunately, there is plenty of other better work by Allen to pick from. Do so.