WHATEVER WORKS

year: 2009

rating: *

A hotdog consists of rejected parts of a pig all thrown together and picked up off the butcher's floor. This is Woody Allen's hotdog. Many of the elements are borrowed from past films, like his fourth-wall-breaking first-person-narrating philosophy of life being meaningless and love being luck and everyone is dying and... all that stuff that was once entertaining when Woody Allen was younger, and funny. His patented neurotic-Jewish-Intellectual character is given to Larry David as a chess-instructing codger who marries a gorgeous teenager, Evan Rachel Wood. This entire concept is funnier than any line in the movie; not ha-ha but "Am I actually supposed to buy this" funny. And there are plenty of one-liners but nothing seems to matter: the characters all frolic stupidly before David so he can put them down. Proving again and again he's no Woody Allen. And as a writer, either is Woody Allen anymore.