This was a strange movie. It is an amusing premise, but done in a horribly heavy-handed manner. It looks gorgeous. The art decoration, cinematography and the jazz sound track are all terrific. But the cast is all wrong! Wood is far too old for his role. He was too old for this role 10 years ago. Helen Hunt is a good actress and has a great body, but there is nothing 1940s about her. She is a creature from the Twenty-First Century who seems to have done some time traveling. The movie is basically `cute', although many of Woody's one-liners fall flat. Among the Woody Allen canon I'd rate this one somewhere slightly below the halfway point. (I put Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Bullets Over Broadway and Hannah and Her Sisters at the top; at the bottom Everyone Says I Love You, Shadows and Fog, and September. I would place this one in about the same category as Radio Days and Alice.) The movie is also far too long. The basic idea is enough to fill out a half hour situation comedy. But here it has been stretched out to the point that I was tired of it a long time before it was over.
Review of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
