CALL ME SNAKE

The other night I saw “Cassandra’s Dream,” which was a recent Woody Allen offering and, compared to most of what he’s put out lately, it’s not half bad. Although the story holds up reasonably well, the movie is marred by a horrible performance by Ewan McGregor, who plays the main character as a mentally-defective dullard–someone who speaks slowly and stresses every syllable as if he were talking to a demented, hard-of-hearing grandmother. Every recent Woody Allen movie that has gotten some acclaim suffers from the same problem. The two main female leads in Vicki Cristina Barcelona were awful and Match Point was similarly ruined by a pathetic performance by Scarlett Johansson who has gone surprisingly far in her career in view of her complete inability to act.

We keep hearing about Woody Allen’s “return to form,” and it seems that’s not going to happen. His last great film was “Husbands and Wives”(1992), and I don’t know if he has another one in him. On the other hand, Allen has created a number of great films, which is more than most of us can say.