Woody Allen, besides writing and directing, plays a has-been filmmaker whose chance at a comeback comes in the form of a bone thrown to him by his former wife -- a $60 million remake of a Forties B-movie -- who is now consort to the philistine head of Galaxy Pictures. For three-quarters of an hour, in predictable and monotonous comic rhythms, the film casually kicks around the bread-and-butter issues of the behind-the-scenes Tinseltown spoof (art vs. commerce, auteur vs. hack, black-and-white vs. color), plus the intermittent inside joke: the fictitious director's fondness for foreign cameramen leads him, where Allen himself was led on his three previous projects, to a Chinese D.P. whose only language is Mandarin. (Allen's current D.P., the German Wedigo von Schultzendorff, offers no let-up in suffocating artiness, pouring a full cup of melted butter over a few puffs of popcorn.) At length and at leisure, the film arrives at its central conceit: a case of psychosomatic blindness which afflicts the director on the eve of the shoot, and which he attempts to conceal throughout it. This is a real idea, a worthwhile idea, an inherently funny idea, although probably not enough of a one to warrant the longest running time -- at 114 minutes -- in Allen's entire career. The idea calls upon Allen the actor to do a more physical kind of comedy than is his custom -- an elaboration on the glazed-eyed hypnotic trances of his prior film, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion -- and he does it very well. Allen the director, on the other hand, was not up to the daunting challenge, was not up to even facing the challenge, of illustrating a movie directed by a blind man: the joke is not, let's be clear, that in today's movie world it makes no difference. With Téa Leoni, Treat Williams, Mark Rydell, Debra Messing, George Hamilton. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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