Marvel Unveils '04 FF Plans Marvel plans three Fantastic Four series for 2004, and we've got the details and preview art. Check this out.
2F2F DVD Contest The hit street racing film 2 Fast 2 Furious is driving to DVD players near you. Win a free copy from Slush and Universal.
Movie Review:
Anything Else By Matt Singer
10.01.03
The title of Anything Else could have several meanings. Within the context of the film it could refer to the protagonist’s frustration with his cruel girlfriend and nonexistent lovelife. Or it could be a question, posed from the audience to writer/director Woody Allen, or even the other way around. The 67 year-old Allen has directed more than 35 pictures, and his last three: Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and Hollywood Ending, have not been well received commercial or critically. In that sense, the title almost indicates a bit of disgust, as if viewers have given up on him, but out of a sense of respect, are offering him that last chance that we are pretty sure is going to fail as well. But Anything Else is pretty good, not a classic Allen picture, but a solid one nonetheless, and within the scope of his career offers some interesting complements and contradictions. It says some new things, and returns to old themes as well.
Allen himself plays David Dobel, a school teacher who is only now getting into humor writing. By chance, he meets another aspiring writer, 21 year old Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs), and the two begin a friendship where Falk and Dobel (They always call each other by their last names) meet in Central Park, and Dobel espouses upon his theories of the world. While Allen’s pictures have focused on issues of death, philosophy, psychiatry, and sex since almost the beginning, Allen, as I understand it, is now out of psychoanalysis for the first time in decades, and it shows through in his character’s very didactic speeches about the essence of life (Which, it seems, is doing what you want, putting up with others as best you can, and relying only on yourself). Whereas Allen’s early characters tended to question life, question existence, now it almost feels as if he has a lifetime of answers and he wants to share them with us.
Article continued below advertisement
Jerry is, as you’d expect in a Woody Allen picture, a neurotic mess. He is incapable of living alone, and so he puts up with a business manager (Danny DeVito) who takes far more money than he deserves, and a girlfriend named Amanda (Christina Ricci) who refuses to have sex with him while she swears over and over that she loves him and adores him and can’t live without him. There have been some unlikable women in Allen’s films, but I can’t think of any more obnoxious than Ricci’s Amanda. She is completely self-absorbed, self-medicating, and cruel, and Ricci has no bones about making her as downright bitchy as possible. Frankly, she’s SO completely unredeeming, and without a positive female to serve as counterpoint, that one could make a pretty compelling argument that Anything Else is Allen’s most anti-women film yet.
The comedy is hit-or-miss, like a lot of later Allen, but it’s more hit than it’s been in quite a while. One scene, where Dobel takes out his anger on a parked car, is one of the most hilariously performed sequences he’s done. For long time fans, there’s quite a bit borrowed from Annie Hall’s direct address to the camera and jumpy storyline and thematically, there’s echoes of Broadway Danny Rose (in the conflict over whether to dump a manager who’s gotten you to the threshold of success), Bullets over Broadway (talented writers forced to work for hacks), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (the morality of violence) just to name a few. Still, there is a lot of stuff here I don’t recognize from previous films, like Dobel’s disturbing obsession with survival kits and keeping firearms close-by at all times. He obsesses over anti-semitism (as Alvy did in Annie Hall) but here, he also goes further in discussions about DeVito’s character which reveal quite a bit of self-loathing about Jews as well. Typically, even the strangest characters in his movies have a kind edge to them, but Dobel is downright creepy, and for a guy who is always accused of playing the same character over and over, it’s nice to see some definite originality.
Anything Else is about fifteen minutes too long, and an edit of that length may have also trimmed out some of the jokes that don’t work. It would have also been wiser if Santo Loquasto’s production design had been a bit more scummy in Jerry’s place, where a struggling writer lives in the coolest, nicest, biggest apartment ever in the history of Manhattan. But it’s still a pretty good movie, funny and worthwhile on its own merits, and it though it does contribute in a meaningful way to an already rich filmography. Biggs is a fine lead, and he does a good job of making Jerry a very relatable character. Ricci is at once, beautiful and repulsive. If Allen can continue to create interesting new characters like these that don’t feel like anachronisms, then his career is far from over. The answer to the “Anything else?” question will continue to be answered for quite a while.
