-I won't lie to you, folks. I don't like Woody Allen movies. At the best of times, they're tolerable, but I find the atypical Allen persona--stuttering, over/psuedo-intellectual neurotic--to be obnoxious. The general situations, of vague love and creative problems in the wealthy side of Manhatten, are unrelatable. The way characters go on about how criticism is dead, music sucks these days, how difficult it is to get a screenplay bought, all that shit, makes me want to strangle something sentient.-So, yeah. I didn't like this movie. Because it featured the worst aspects of Woody Allen movies, and turned them up to eleven. We get not one, but two neurotic main characters, Kenneth Branaugh (who does a pretty great Allen impression) and Judy Davis, as a long-married couple who separate and go on to various amount of success, one hindered by his fame seeking, the other rewarded for her modesty. The actors do nothing wrong, you understand.
-A bevy of supporting characters--Charlize Theron as an impulsive supermodel, Melanie Griffith as a starlet, Leonardo DiCaprio as a parody of himself, with Adrian Grenier and Sam Rockwell as some tagalongs, Fat Tony (fine, Joe Mantegna) as a TV producer and Davis's eventual husband, Winona Ryder as a wish-washy actress, Bebe Neuwirth gets a funny scene as a prostitute. They all add to the ridiculousness of celebrity.
-Didn't like it. The actors did what they could, but overall, it was just too Woody Allen, like a parody of his typical stuff.