DECONSTRUCTING HARRY Grade: A (Highly Recommended)
Directed by Woody Allen Written by Allen Starring: Allen, Judy Davis, Billy Crystal, Bob Balaban Year of Release: 1997 Rating: R
Deserves Recognition for: Making me laugh hard enough to almost completely obliterate all memories of Shadows and Fog.
Capsule Review: I'm going to go out on a limb here and call this consistently hilarious, and surprisingly raw (Has Soon-Yi been bringing home Kevin Smith videos or something?) look at the thin line between fiction and plagiarism Woody Allen's most satisfying film since Annie Hall. Allen, even more neurotic and self-loathing than usual, plays a successful author catching hell from both the people around him and their thinly veiled fictional counterparts. (The all-too-brief vignettes that we get to see of his writing contains some of Allen's finest absurdist humor since Bananas, including a Star Wars themed bar mitzvah that made me briefly consider changing my religion.) As usual, Woody is backed by some stellar talent, including Julia-Louise Dreyfuss, Mariel Hemmingway in a sly reversal of her Manhattan role, a surprisingly capable Demi Moore, and the wondrous Judi Davis, who once again proves that no other actor can make a 10-or-12 letter obscenity detonate off the screen quite the way she can. Harry may shock some long-time Allen viewers by its sheer mean-spiritedness, but it's a quality that seems to have sprung the director from the stale complacency that's marred much of his recent work. As long as he can stay away from the Bergman influence for a while, this bodes well for The Woodman's cinematic future.
Copyright 1998 by The Critic formerly known as Andrew Wright For more insanely biased reviews, check out http://www.seanet.com/~louk/ e-mail louk@seanet.com
"Saturday Night Thing. Drunken Hillbilly Bar Fight. My Soul Rejoices."
A Haiku in honor of ROADHOUSE A9Andrew L. Wright esq.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews