Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Whatever Works

"You gotta take what little pleasure you can find in this chamber of horrors," Larry David says for Woody Allen at the beginning of the movie.

The solution to the silence of god and the terror of death is love, or sex, whichever you can manage.

The problem with this movie is the jokes. They're just not funny. They are either throw-away quips that are only funny on paper, like when Larry gets a panic attack and Evan Rachel Wood turns on the television to calm him.
"I saw the abyss," Larry says.
"Don't worry, we'll watch something else."
Whereas the other jokes get hit repeatedly on the head with a dead fish.

This isn't my favorite movie of Woody Allen's. Usually when he returns to older material it is during a period of stagnation. But he'd just been putting out some really mature and worthwhile movies. So it's suprising this vehicle originally written for Zero Mostel flopped so badly.

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