ANYTHING ELSE

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Woody Allen's pictures are still as they have always been, exhausting things that fetishize young women, moan about writer's block (if only it were true), and reference the Woodman's love for foreign films without offering any commensurate ability to recreate what it is that made Ingmar Bergman (only the most obvious hero worshipped) resplendent. In the past, Allen's films, all of them taking place and this one no different, in a bizarre hinter-Manhattan where the only minorities are Asian delivery boys, were occasionally diverting satires, maps of neurosis and charming for a perceived self-deprecation. With years of legend worn sloppily, however, Allen's work is increasingly onanistic, increasingly wearying, and increasingly, let's face it, creepy.

Anything Else fails the sniff test in nearly every category, its tale of young couple Amanda and Jerry (Ricci and Jason Biggs--she a wooden maniac, he a promising young Woody Allen impersonator) is absolutely insufferable from first frame to last. Misanthropic and shrill, a scene where Allen's David Dobel (referred to eternally as Dobel as in "Nobel" as in the prize), Jerry's idol and mentor, takes a tire iron to the car of some bullies isn't nearly so funny as it is pathetic and strange. This isn't an act of rebellion, it's low wish-fulfillment fantasy played for laughs--a little like the rest of Allen's low wish-fulfillment fantasies. Ricci logs her worst performance ever, which allows the Ricci of Pumpkin to breathe a sigh of relief, and Biggs is revealed at last as the most non-descript wallpaper in an otherwise handsomely appointed set. The sex-talk would only be shocking to a product of the same time warp that has zapped Woody from 1922, and the requisite chat about "high art" (Dostoevsky in this case) could only have been punched up by a McLuhan-esque cameo from the old dead Russian, himself.

Anything Else is so bad, in fact, that it's destined to be referred to as either the film that at least the new Woody Allen film isn't as bad as, or the moment that marked the beginning of the final end of Allen as a conversation worth having in American film. Once the most vital and "plugged-in" comic voice for a disaffected generation, Allen has fallen too in love with the lull of celebrity and the fascination of the self--it isn't the case that Allen's films have become less transparent, but that Allen has become jarringly irrelevant. His insecurities and imperfections exhaustively documented, they are--testament, perhaps, to his skill--exhausting: the tide of frankness has swept on by, leaving Allen with tepid backwash and a sour wake.-Walter Chaw

Having collaborated on several pictures with Gordon Willis, a cinematographer nicknamed "The Prince of Darkness" for his love of silhouetted images, Woody Allen hired Willis' heir apparent Darius Khondji--a DP who has, in fact, earned the same diminutive in his native France for a love of operating almost entirely on fill lights--to shoot Anything Else. Alas, Khondji is overqualified: although Manhattan, Allen's only previous 'scope picture, looks spectacular, the Woodman never really was a Panavision kind of guy, and an early-nineties flirtation with handheld seemed to signal a new, laissez-faire attitude towards framing in general; Khondji's work here, represented by a terrific, if grainy 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer on DVD, is nowhere near as intoxicating as his noirish endeavours Seven and Alien Resurrection, though it does profitably revisit the nectar glow he devised with Bernardo Bertolucci for Stealing Beauty. The 2.0 mono soundmix is more or less acceptable--while the majority of Allen's movies wouldn't benefit from the 5.1 treatment, Anything Else features a live performance from Diana Krall that lacks the tonality of her concert CDs. On-screen production notes (in which Allen says that Christina Ricci is the one actress he'd been dying to work with--please tell me he was being tongue-in-cheek) and cast and crew filmos/bios round out the DreamWorks platter.-Bill Chambers

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