OxfordPress.com

Grade: C-

Verdict: Begins well, then goes south.

Details: Starring Woody Allen, Téa Leoni and Treat Williams. Directed by Allen. Rated PG-13 for sexuality. One hour, 54 minutes.

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Review: I'm convinced Woody Allen has one more great movie — maybe even a couple more — in him. But “Hollywood Ending” isn't it. To put it in the context of his career for the last ten years, it's better than “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” and not nearly as good as “Manhattan Murder Mystery.”

The movie opens in Hollywood where Hal (Treat Williams), a hugely powerful studio head, is trying to pick the director for his next picture. Ellie (Téa Leoni), a studio exec who's also Hal's fiancée, suggests he use her ex-husband, Val (Allen), once an Oscar-winning director, now reduced to shooting deodorant commercials in Canada during a blizzard. Everyone else at the meeting disagrees, calling Val “a raving, incompetent psychopath.” Says Ellie, “He's not incompetent.”

Still, Val gets the job, with Ellie offering to keep an eye on him for Hal. We quickly discover he's not over her, even though he has a live-in hardbody girlfriend (Debra Messing), who's young enough to be, well, you know.

Then the real complications set in. Unnerved by this second chance, Val develops psychosomatic blindness. His agent insists he can direct the film anyway, which leads to some blind jokes that were old even before Allen was born. There is one good gag: the Japanese-American college kid hired to translate for the Japanese cinematographer is recruited as Val's seeing-eye dog of sorts. (Barney Cheng is very funny in the role.) However, a bit with a sexy star (Tiffani Thiessen) coming on to Allen, not knowing he can't see, is like something out of a vaudeville sketch from the 1920s, or a teen movie from the 1990s.

Is “Hollywood Ending” funny? Sometimes. Allen still gets off vintage one-liners like Val saying, “For me, the best part about masturbation is afterwards. The cuddling part.” And there are still those classic love-letter shots of Manhattan.

But much of the movie is stale and oddly dated. The jokes about Val's estranged son wearing nipple rings and orange hair are, what, 10 years too old? Fifteen? His comments about the horror of multiplexes might have been cutting edge in, when, 1984? Maybe 1980? There's a revealing anecdote Leoni told on one of the morning shows. When she questioned Allen about a scene, saying the script didn't seem current, he replied, “Of course it is. I wrote it a year ago.” Yikes.

As usual, he's chosen a fine, eclectic group of actors. Leoni is especially winning, so much so that you wish she could've worked with Allen when he was in his prime, but, of course, she was a a teenager then. That brings up the fact that Leoni, 33 years younger than Allen, is seen as "age appropriate" for his character. Couldn't we draw the line at, say, 20 years younger?

You hang in with “Hollywood Ending,” hoping the jokes will get funnier or the plot will get better. It would be so lovely if this movie provided not an “ending,” but a worthwhile and welcome addition to Allen's career. It isn't junk, but it sure isn't the Allen we used to know.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)