I suppose I will tackle the complaint I hear most often from people.  I keep hearing people bitch about the fact the movie is too “complicated“.  I really don’t understand this at all.  This movie is densely packed with exposition.  I mean when you take something that normally takes a miniseries to unravel and put it into a two hour movie, then scenes are going to be packed with info.  Look, I really am no Rhodes scholar and I have my share of movies which I get confused over.  But all I had to do in this movie was just pay attention to what the characters were saying.  Seriously, what the hell are so many people getting hung up on?

I’m not going to get into any spoilers so this review may be shorter than usual.  TTSS is a very well crafted spy thriller/mystery.  Alfredson does a great job recreating the time period and establishing the paranoid atmosphere of the movie.  The movie is packed with top Brit stars who do a good job despite some really thin roles in some cases.  The plot also has many of the natural swerves which makes the mystery interesting.  Really, I think most of the hate I am seeing is a backlash to the earlier glowing reviews (some placing it at #1 of the year).  This movie is just a spy thriller.  It is a well made spy thriller, but at the end of the day it is a spy thriller.  When they come out and find it is not some grand statement on Brittain or the Cold War or paranoia they get pissed off.

I do have my issues with TTSS.  It does feel like the plot is compressed with the two hour time span.  Some scenes are jam packed with dry exposition and even with the expert talent here, it still feels like an audiobook rather than a movie.  The majority of the characters, especially the four suspects, are completely ignored.  We never get a good feel of them as characters so there is not much impact when we find out who the mole is.  This movie needed more time for us to get to know the characters and to pace things out better.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a good movie.  It is not the best movie of the year, nor anywhere near the worst.  It is good, and I’m fine with that.  It is a well written spy movie with good acting and director with an eye for detail.  It has its problems mainly due to the constricting of the dense source material, but it doesn’t ruin the movie.  If you were interested in this movie I would still give it a shot.  Maybe this is best suited for home viewing.

With Tintin, Spielberg is able to correct many of those problems.  The movie is about investigative reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy.  Tintin (Jamie Bell) finds an old model ship which has a part of a clue for hidden treasure.  Tintin finds continually drunk Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) who is part of the family of sailors who lost the treasure.  They are trying to find it before the evil Sakharine (Daniel Craig) does.

As I mentioned, many things which soured the Jones series was able to get corrected here.  For one, we have the teenage Tintin who has all the youtful exuberence that Ford was lacking.  This movie is family friendly, but it works here mostly because of the motion capture universe.  I don’t really feel into getting into the psychology of it all, but you are willing to go along more with stuff in an animated setting than you would with real people.  In Tintin, you don’t mind there is a super smart dog who practically has a telekinetic link with his master, you don’t mind a man powering a plane with his drunk belches, etc.  You do mind when Shia Lebeouf is swinging around on vines like freaking Tarzan.

The motion capture gives Spielberg freedom of camera movement and character movements.  There is one of the final action scenes in particular where the camera continually follows Tintin chasing Sakharine for the map.  Everything is happening from buildings collapsing, Snowy chasing map pieces, and characters zipping around everywhere.  It is great to look at and would have been impossible in live action.

The voice acting in this movie is very good.  Jamie Bell does a good job giving the rather blandly written Tintin a personality.  Andy Serkis does the best job as Haddock and steals the movie.  Simon Pegg and Nick Frost also do a good job with the small roles they have.  The weakest performance has to go with Daniel Craig which is sad.  It’s not that he is bad, but compared to everyone else he is very bland.  With this kind of movie, you want a villain who can deliver more of a hammy performance like a Tim Curry.

My only real complaint is that you aren’t given much of a character of Tintin.  Now I know nothing about Tintin so I can’t make any comment about how well it translates or whatnot.  I am just talking about in terms of being exposed to this character for the first time.  We aren’t really told much about Tintin and why he is a special character.  It comes off more like anyone could fill this role of generic treasure hunter.  It seems like there will be sequels and hopefully in the second one we get more of a focus on Tintin’s background and his overall character.

This was a fun movie.  Personally I feel bad I saw War Horse first instead of this.  The characters are charming, the writing by Moffat and Wright is clever, and the action set pieces are well done.  It is, as I said before, more family oriented so I guess some could take issue it is too kiddy.  But I had a good time with this movie and would give it a recommendation.

But I guess I’ll go a little further and explain briefly how I felt about the series.  Mission Impossible was a good action thriller if you can take it as just an action thriller.  If you are looking at it as movie actually about Mission Impossible you will be mad especially at the raping of the team and especially the complete character assassination of Jim Phelps.  MI:II is actually funny to recall because as a kid I thought it was fun and looking at it recently I wonder what brain damage I suffered at that age to make me think that.  MI:III was okay except that it really didn’t stick with me.  Honestly, I really don’t remember anything about the movie except for small bits.  It was directed by JJ Abrams and it honestly felt at the time like he directed a movie version of Alias except with Tom Cruise instead of Jennifer Garner.  It also seems like many others forgot about this movie too as many of the people I talked to about Ghost Protocol called it Mission Impossible III.  So this was another movie was really dreading to see but as it turns out this is probably my favorite action movie of the year.

This is, hands down, the best Mission Impossible movie of the bunch.  It helps that we FINALLY have a team collaborating on a mission instead of it being the Tom Cruise show.  The crew actually has more character development than Tom in this one.  Simon Pegg does a great job at comic relief (whitout going overboard on goofy), Paula Patton is very charismatic, and Jeremy Renner shares some of the action.  While Cruise still handles most of the big action, it is strange that he seems to be in the Jim Phelps role of wise leader.

The focus is on the action, which is done extremely well.  I wouldn’t give this movie a back handed compliment by saying the plot is simple but that it does the job it needs to do for the purposes of this type of movie.  We are quickly told who the bad guy is and shown why he is evil and the mission is layed out simply in ‘go to A and do B‘.  The complications aren’t in the plot but how the team decides to work out their plan.  That is why this works.  We aren’t fussing over plot details and instead invested in the mission and how they plan to deal with the problems that come up in their path.  Bird does a great job in giving the audience several different and inventive action sequences such as the tower climb, the sand storm chase, and the parking garage brawl.  And because we actually care about the characters it makes the action all that more intense.

The movie still has the over the top gadgets but they work to better effect in this movie.  For example, I hated the face mask plus the voice box because it seemed like an easy out for everyone involved.  It added no drama or tension to the story and was used as a lame reveal every single time.  Here one of the tech pieces used are the climbing gloves which, while complete nonsense, doesn’t change the fact Ethan Hunt still has to physically climb to the top of a 130 story building.  Bird does a better job than the other Impossible directors in establishing the universe of this movie.  It is set up as a rather tongue-in-cheek action movie where characters can bounce off cars and not get hurt and all the spys have super cool cars/gadgets.

If I had a complaint it might be that the villain is almost non-existent.     Seriously, he and Ethan don’t exchange ANY dialog in this movie.  If there was one thing I actually loved about MI:III is was Phillip Seymore Hoffman as probably the only villain in the series with any menace.  But that being said, the movie was more about the mission to get to the villain rather than the villain himself.

Ghost Protocol is kind of like the Iron Man of 2011.  It is a film that not many people were expecting to be awesome and just caught everyone off guard.  I’m sure this will spawn some more sequels and here’s hoping they have the same energy and imagination as Ghost Protocol.  I loved this movie as it was the summer blockbuster I was waiting all year for.  Check it out.

The point is even expecting what I knew from Spielberg, I still wasn’t expecting what ultimately came from War Horse.  My conversations with people when they ask about it usually go like this:

So you see War Horse?

–Yeah.

How was it?

–Bad.  It is super schaltzy.

Well yeah, it’s Spielberg.

–No dude.  It’s bad…REALLY bad here.

And things end with them with them having a quizzical look on their face.  So, I guess I need to elaborate a little bit more.  Yes, I am aware Spielberg is a little sentimental.  However even with movies like ET, the emotions and the feelings still came up rather organically.  Elliot and ET were both likable characters and their friendship was developed over the course of the movie.  So even when Spielberg played with your heartstrings by having ET be all sickly, it didn’t feel like outright manipulation.  With War Horse, it feels like everyone in the movie is shoving a funnel down your throat and force feeding you saccharine crap.  Nothing comes natural at all and instead, we have to be TOLD how to feel about things.

Take for example the very beginning of the movie where the family gets the horse of this movie.  Local farmers and land owners are bidding on several horses.  The lovable poor farm owner is on one end and the EEEEEEEVVVILLLL greedy land owner is on the other.  You want to know how he is evil?  Because the first time we see him, John Williams personally tied me down to my theater chair and slapped me with his baton while screaming in my ear “HE’S A BAD GUY! HE’S A BAD GUY! HE’S A BAD GUY!“  Then, instead of being practical and buying a plow horse, our protagonists father blows all his money (including rent money) on buying the horse of our movie?  Why?  Because he wants to show up his greedy landlord.  As an audience member you are thinking this is petty dickish behavior that makes the father the bad guy because he put personal feelings in the way of, you know, feeding his family.  But Spielberg and Williams slap you around some more assuring you he is just being damn adorable.  The next scene we get said landowner asking the father for the rent he is due and the father not having it.  The landowner, very rightly, calls him an idiot for giving away all his money in an attempt to show him up and says he will give the land to people who will actually pay rent.  The son and mother then beg for an extention on their loan which the landowner, charitbly, gives them.  The landowner says though that if they don’t pay the extention, he has to take their land which is met with many a “How could you!“ from the family and more orchestra stings that he is greedy and evil.

This is what I have to deal with here.  For one that the material isn’t strong enough for us to judge things on their own; that we have to be assaulted with audio/visual cues as to how we feel.  But not only that, is that there is a disconnect between what the director wants us to feel and how the audience really thinks.

Everything is just so damn over the top.  It doesn’t take that much to get us to care for an animal.  For crying out loud most movies of this genre are built solely around the premise animals are cute and plot be damned.  But it’s not enough that the boy Albert loves the horse, but he has to spend every waking hour staring at it and writing it letters and pining for it like Edward does to Bella.  It is not enough that the war horse in question is lovable by itself, it has to be Lassie levels of intelligent.  I swear the way they built this up as some super horse I thought they were going to have it talk.

You can almost tell what the writers were thinking in trying to give the horse so much personality.  The plot, isn’t really about this boy Albert and his horse.  Instead the movie follows the horse as it changes owners through the years of WWI.  It’s rather hard to have the narrative focus on something that can’t talk and only has one facial expression.  I guess if Paul Walker can do it a horse can do but you can’t really have a movie with growth or progress when it’s focused on an F’n horse.  It doesn’t feel like anything is driving the plot and merely meanders around.  I wasn’t so much wondering at this amazing horse but looking at my watch and wondering when this will end.

Now I would be lying if I said there was nothing good in this movie.  The small storyline involving a little girl and her grandfather getting the horse I really liked.  The girl was adorable enough to make you go “Awwwwwwwwwww“ and Niels Arestrup does a fantastic job.  He’s not anyone you know by name but when you see him you probably recognize him.  Here it doesn’t matter the writing is bad he sells it like his life depended on it.  There are some scenes on the battlefield which are effective and some scenes in the end that still make you water up (or just me I guess).

I still didn’t really hate this film.  Oh it’s bad, that’s for sure.  But I’m pretty much chalking this up to everyone having an off day.  I hear this movie was an attempt to salvage the source material which seems unfilmable due to the narrative being through the eyes of the horse although with Spielbergs use of animation in TinTin that makes me question even that.  But yeah, I started the holiday season with the wrong Spielberg.  This one really didn’t do it for me.

The movie is a clever twist on very worn down horror cliches.  At first it plays itself as an Eli Roth horror film about snotty teens who are going to the woods to “ party“ when they are hunted down by a pair of hillbillies.  They are driving to their cabin when they cut off the titular character on the freeway and the teens think the hillbillies are gunning for them.  The clever turn is when we find out Tucker and Dale are really nice good ole boys who are just looking to fix up an old cabin so they can have a permenant vacation spot.  This sets up several funny misunderstandings about the teens thinking they are getting hunted down.

For example, Tucker and Dale are fishing when they see one of the girls fall and hit her head.  They decide to rescue her but what the rest of the partying friends see are these guys dragging an unconcious girl on their boat yelling “WE GOT YUR FRIEND!“  Or there is another scene where the group comes across Tucker and Dale’s Evil Dead style cabin they are fixing up and Tucker (while cutting wood with a chainsaw) accidentily cuts into a bees nest.  This sends him into a frenzy where runs around blindly with a running chainsaw.

The writing is very good in that it has many variations on essentially one joke.  I think they also realize how it can easily get repetitive because they don’t overstay their welcome.  T&DvE barely clocks in at 80 minutes but this is a good thing because of the thin premise.  I also like how Tucker and Dale aren’t overwritten as Larry the Cable Guy “Get er done!“ broad stereotypes.  Yeah they have some redneck traits but they are not overdone cariactures.  Both are really nice guys who have a really nice friendship.  What is surprising is this almost touching friendship and small message about believing in yourself.  This is helped by actors Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk.  I mean come on, you can’t beat Wash from Firefly.

This was a pleasant little surprise.  I was expecting something very lazy but got a clever little comedy.  The actors are having fun with the material and the writing does as much as it can with the thin premise.  This flew under my radar but thankfully the positive reviews dragged me into seeing it.

Production Budget: $30 million

Worldwide Gross: $33 million

When I first heard of this movie bombing I had a feeling of the general audience letting me down (as if anyone really owes me anything but anyway…).  Whenever a remake or reboot of an old franchise comes out like the Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmonks it is usually slammed as being a betrayal of the original source material and god awful marketing crap and blah blah blah.  Meanwhile you get a movie which stays about as faithful as you can to the original look and feel (while simultaneously being a very enjoyable story) and it is a failure at the box office.

But there were many things which let this movie down.  One was the extremely befuddling decision to release this in the summer movie months.  It is hard for any movie to compete against a blockbuster like Harry Potter or Captain America, while simultaneously competing with other kids movies like a Smurfs.  I mentioned earlier when this movie first came out that it would seem a better idea to release this closer to the beginning of the year.  The beginning of the year is a dead zone where most studios dump their crap like Atari dumping so many cartridges of ET.  But that would actually work in the favor of Pooh because there would be no competition for the same audience and parents would be desperate to take them to anything good.  I would certainly want to be opening next to Country Strong, The Dilemma, and The Green Hornet rather than Harry Potter, Captain America, and Smurfs.

Another thing which did hurt the movie was the running time.  Pooh itself is only about 56 minutes.  In theaters I think they had a 20 minute short but on my DVD they didn’t have it.  I know I always talk about how I would rather have an awesome short movie than a mediocre long one.  The problem is I’m not a parent.  I spoke with many friends who are parents and who really wanted to see a great Pooh movie but who didn’t want to go to the theater.  They want something that will occupy their children’s attention for more than an hour and it is especially bad with ticket prices.  Can you really justify spending money on tickets for the whole family, food, and beverages for something that is over relatively quick?  Maybe they should have done another short to pad out the run time even more.  But if there is a silver lining it is that I think this movie is much better suited to the DVD market than the theater market.  It is nothing to rent this from Blockbuster/Red Box/Netflix/Video on Demand/etc. compared to the money you spend at the theater.  It will definetly be more of a hit now.  Now with that being said, let me get on with the review.

Now I usually don’t go in for kids movies much nowadays but I found this rather charming.  You immediately get on my good side for not trying to be in 3D, for having more traditional animation, and not having it be an endless parade of pop culture references.  It’s simple, and I love that.  To me, the animation in this movie is much more beautiful than most faux Pixar movies are.  The characters are classic, and don’t need to be transported to modern times or put in an new setting.  You can see the care and effort put into this movie.  You have some new voice talent like Craig Fergugon for Owl that are really fun in the role.  Even some music by Zooey Daschenel add to the overall charm of the movie.

The story has the characters searching for Christopher Robin as he is missing.  He leaves a note saying he will be “back soon” but is misinterpreted as being taken by a Backsun.  The gang try to capture this Backsun while also trying to find Eeyore’s lost tail.  There isn’t much to the story but it perfectly allows all the characters to get involved in the action.  Tigger wants to fight it, Owl wants to be the leader, Eeyore is…indifferent, and Pooh is wondering if there is any honey in it for him.  Each character has their own moment to shine and the music is actually pretty good.

If you are a fan of Winnie the Pooh, then I think you will really enjoy this movie.  The voice talent is just as good and the material is clever enough to make you rediscover why they were so lovable in the first place.  Care and attention are brought to the producion with is nostalgic and charming.  And while the movie is about 56 minutes, to me it fits the amount of story they had and, as I mentioned before, is better suited to home rental than spending a ton of money at the theaters.  This is a kids movie so I can’t give a total recommendation to it.  But if you love the old Pooh cartoons or have kids then you should definetly check it out.

Production Budget: $70 million

Worldwide Gross: $69 million

Ronny (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Kevin James) are long time friends/business partners.  They are on the verge of selling a new product to Dodge but Nick is under serious pressure to get it done by a tight deadline.  On top of all that, Ronny finds Nick’s wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) is cheating on Nick.  Ronny is faced with the titular dilemma: do you tell Nick and potentially lose the friendship, or keep it a secret?

The problem is this “dilemma“, isn’t so much of a dilemma.  In fact it is so simple the movie has to throw so many extra hurdles to make it a dilemma that the effort involved in making it a dilemma, is almost a comedy.  Oh, you would tell your best friend?  Well, what if telling him would ruin a big business deal?  You would?  Well, what if it would kill him?  What if his wife was some evil bitch who would blackmail you?  What if aliens came down and offered a night with Megan Fox if you didn’t tell him?  Okay, that last part didn’t happen but you get the idea.  The point is this movie is trying to sell you on a drama/comedy dilemma which is supposed to be relatable to most people but ends up being ridiculous to the level of aliens coming down to make a deal.

Then we get the characters artificially inflating the movie by acting like moronic jack holes.  There are the usual Three’s Company misunderstandings in wacky comedies, but here they turn it up to 11.  And all this STILL wouldn’t be that bad if the movie didn’t go all bipolar and be a dramatic comedy.  Yeah, in the same movie where we get dick jokes and people falling out of trees, we get Vince Vaughn crying and BS sentimentality.  The tone is too jarring, and sometimes the jokes don’t even make that much sense.  Take for example when Ronny is asking around for what he should do about the dilemma.  He calls his sister and presents it as a hypothetical “friend“ story to which she interprets as her husband cheating on her.  But it doesn’t make any sense because Ronny’s sister doesn’t know or have any interaction with Nick.  Why doesn’t he just present the situation as him finding Nick’s wife cheating on him?

Then there are plot threads that really go nowhere.  There are an easy twenty minutes that could be cut involving them selling this fake motor to Dodge and a bizarre supporting role by Queen Latifa.  Yeah, I know the looming business deal is part of why Ronny is hesitant to tell Nick but we don’t need this explained over twenty minutes.  This movie is 1 hour and 51 minutes and it feels like it is well over two hours.

The main characters aren’t all that compelling either.  Vince Vaughn’s character is a hot head lying A-hole who treats his fiance as an afterthought.  And even though the core of the movie is whether to tell Nick this bad news or not, the movie glosses over the fact Nick is also cheating on his wife.  HELLO!  I mean, it doesn’t validate the things Geneva does but it makes Nick just as big a prick.

Vince Vaughn tries to be charming but even he seems tired of doing the ole Vince Vaughn shtick.  Kevin James is wasted as he is the person the other characters are tap dancing around.  Because of that James never gets a chance to have any good comedy bits.  Jennifer Connolly is Madam Not Appearing in This Film.  Queen Latifa is in a completely different movie.  Channing Tatum gets a few chuckles out of his sensitive thug role.  Winona Ryder is the only one coming out of this movie looking good though.  She gives this movie a far better performance than it deserves.

I didn’t go into this looking to slam Ron Howard.  I actually really like some of the movies he does.  I wasn’t expecting The Dilemma to break the mold or anything, but I was expecting Howard to know tone and storytelling enough to make a good comedy.  You see glimpses here and there of the comedy he wanted to make.  Of the times Vaughn and James actually have scenes to themselves, they actually do have a good chemistry.  There are also good moments from Ryder and Tatum when they play up their roles.  I think if Howard made a true screwball movie about this bromance between Vaughn and James and about how evil Ryder was trying to break them up it would have done a lot better.  Instead we introduce this bad dramatic tone which kills the work Vaughn and James are trying to do.  What you are left with is a badly written snoozefest which was dumped out in January.

I’ll offer some free advice for Ron Howard though to prevent another bomb.  Don’t spend $70 million dollars on a movie that should cost about $5 million to actually make.

Production Budget: $75 million

Worldwide Gross: $71 million

George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is a comedian who has hit it big with his movie career.  When he discovers he has a terminal illness he reflects on how lonely he is and how unfulfilled he is in his career.  He goes back on the improv circuit and takes on Ira (Seth Rogen), a young green performer, as a protege.

Funny People isn’t really a movie about coping with an illness such as, say, 50/50 which came out this year.  Instead, the illness is merely a way to provide George with self-reflection.  While I don’t know how much of Apatow’s real feelings are a part of this movie, it is partly based on Sandler (whom he lived with early in their careers) and Rogen.  Funny People is seemingly a reflection of fame and the especially cutthroat comedy industry.  Fame itself is cutthroat, but there is something about the way characters in this movie (and potentially in Apatow’s own experience) act especially dog-eat-dog when it comes to being “funny people“.  No one thinks about collaborating with other comedians as they want to protect their jokes like diamonds.  Ira and his friends are on a small surface level, happy of each other’s success, but are incredibly bitter and resentful on the inside.  There are a lot of barbs thrown at one another which could be seen as playful ribbing, but to me it seems more malicious.

There is also this belief that great comedy comes from great tragedy.  So not only is George a loner because he is a greedy, self-obsessed a-hole, but almost because he has more of a desire to keep his comic edge.  I doubt if this was intended, but it is a strange feeling I got about George.  It seems like he is so obsessed about being funny that he subconciously sabotages everything meaningful for some good material.

Funny People took me a while to get to.  This was due to the rather ‘blah‘ reviews coupled with the long running time.  This is just my personal belief of course, but it is a rare comedy that can be great over two hours.  Comedies are at their best when they are streamlined and hit you with their best stuff.  It is hard to keep audiences on that high energy level as you have to with comedies.  Hell, I could go to a comedy show with all of my favorite comedians of all time and I would still get burned out at around the 100 minute mark.  There is only so much hilarity you can take in one sitting before you need to chill out.

Is Funny People one of those rare exceptions for me where it stays great during its 146 minute run time?  Sadly no.  I was actually really liking it through the first two acts before tiring out completely at the two hour mark.  The last act is about George trying to win back former lover Laura (Leslie Mann) from her husband Clarke (Eric Bana).  It is strange that I lauged quite a bit during this act and really liked the performances of Mann and Bana, but still felt this plot line could have been almost completely cut and would have helped the movie.  The romance feels like an afterthought as Laura really has no character or any development despite her screen time.  The point of it all is to show that George didn’t learn anything from his near death experience and is still a selfish ass.  That point really didn’t need to be stretched to over 30 minutes and shows that a few edits would have made this a great movie instead of a good one.

The acting is very good overall.  I have grown to loathe Adam Sandler comedies so I appreciate any time he doesn’t do one of his Happy Madison bowel movements.  He does a fine job although I will say there were times where he was struggling with the dramatic material.  He was asked to do a little too much at times and it comes off as really strained.  The rest of the supporting cast and Rogen in particular are really good though.

As I said before, I was enjoying Funny People quite a bit for a lot of the long running time.  Apatow is able to make these characters, who can act pretty dickish at times, charming and likable at others.  There were many funny moments as there was a good balance of written jokes and seemingly some good improv moments.  I also felt like there was some good depth to the movie with the dramatic elements.

That being said, the movie does lose a ton of steam as it keeps going on and on and on to its two hour and thirty minute end time.  The pacing is way too leisurely, some plot threads meander too much, and some are downright unnecessary.  Apatow does great with the comedy and has some good dramatic ideas, but he falters in actually executing them.  Funny People could have used a few more re-writes and a good editor to tighten everything up.  If you are a fan of Sandler’s usual type of comedy then I don’t think you will like it.  If you like Sandler’s more dramatic turns, then you may want to check it out.  Overall, it is good, but it could have been much better.

Purple Rose of Cairo is a “guilty displeasure“ and I am REALLY guilty for not liking it.  I read a lot of reviews and I see several sites list the best and worst Woody Allen movies and all of them list this movie as one of his crowning achievements.  Some people can hate every other stereotypical Woody movie, but will still fall in love with Purple Rose.  I even love Midnight in Paris, a movie which some would accuse Woody of stealing from Purple Rose (which is a crock but that’s a whole other matter).   But I’ve now watched it twice and can’t fully get behind it.

Maybe I have a disagreement over the ending.  Yes, I know what Woody was intending with the ending.  My problem may be with the fact that for 90% of the movie we have the tone of light hearted fantasy and then for the last 10% we have harsh reality crashing down on our main character’s head.  I don’t know how more people aren’t given whiplash by the strong tonal shift.  Or maybe I’m still not completely sold on Jeff Daniels as Tom.  Don’t get me wrong, I usually love Jeff Daniels and I actually think he gives a good performance.  He still doesn’t quite have the look of suave renaissance man with gorgeous looks.  I’m sure that argument could be shot down within the movie by seeing a Fred Astaire movie but like I said, guilty displeasures don’t have the best arguments in the world.

I do really love the concept of the movie and some of the funniest bits are when the characters still stuck in the movie are trying to figure out what to do now that one of the main characters has bolted.  Mia Farrow probably gives her best performance as the always optimistic woman who is constantly getting shat on by society.  Not to mention Woody Allen is once again showing his mastery in making this story work and having the audience be completely won over by the charm of it all.  This is all kinds of counter-intuitive, but I recommend people go out and watch this movie.  This is some of Woody’s best work and I think anyone who hasn’t seen it will be quickly won over by its charm.  This is just one of those times where my brain and my tastes aren’t on the same page.

Broadway Danny Rose is actually a very simple road movie.  It is no more complicated than say, a Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.  Danny has a short amount of time to get Tina to the gig and wacky shenanigans ensue.  I’m not saying that is a bad thing.  It is just odd that in this period where Woody is at his most creative and close to the time where he said he wanted to do more serious work that he would do a simple road movie.

Broadway Danny Rose is almost completely carried by the performance of Woody Allen.  Here he is probably at his most nebbish.  He is always flailing his arms around, tossing out one liners like they are going out of style, and not a second goes by that he is not stuttering.  For those of you that hate the typical Woody character, you will absolutely hate this movie because he cranks it up to 11 here.  This is all Woody, all the time.  Hell, I love Woody Allen but there were moments even I wanted him to take his meds.  Allen does ultimately make this movie work as he does have some truly funny lines and makes the character lovable.

I know this one is a very short review but that is because there is not much to this movie.  And again, I don’t mean that in any negative way.  If you love Woody Allen’s characters then I think you will find this a funny movie.  There are one liners a plenty and Allen puts it all out there for a funny performance.  While I didn’t love it, it was a funny little movie.