Hollywood Ending
Woody Allen is not perfect, and this is an example of it. Just like Scoop, this still has chucklegoofs, but the drudge you need to wade through before getting to the good jokes is too much.
The film goes way too much into the meta level, and at some point you don’t know if the actresses are doing terrible jobs “on purpose”, or it is just bad acting.
The worse is reserved for Woody himself, since I just couldn’t discern what was self-deprecating commentary on himself, or the character. Not that his films had always had this side, but they usually stand of their own, or that commentary only makes the jokes even better. The main plot just isn’t very interesting, it’s a funny joke that gets progressively unfunny as the runtime approaches 2 hours.
I think Scoop is worse than this, but it’s definitively a low point in his career.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.