Word: comically
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...could never seem to draw a sober breath or a sunny moral. What, then, is Woody Allen doing starring in, writing and directing a ruefully romantic comedy that is at least as poignant as it is funny and may be the most autobiographical film ever made by a major comic...
There are plenty of one-liners about the classic anti-hero's copelessness in sexual and other matters as Allen dips once again into the comic capital that he has been living off for years. It is, however, the best measure of this movie's other strengths that even when these gags are very good, they often seem unnecessary and intrusive: mood busters...
Allen gives himself a wonderfully comic urban background, Jewish and lower-class; the family home stands -shakily-beneath the Coney Island roller coaster. It is all in hopeless contrast with her Wasp Middle Westernism. When the pair finally get to L.A., Allen refuses to see it, as most recent movies have, as merely spaced out. To him, it is actively malevolent-the biggest clogged drain of them...
...general believability. His central figures and all who cross their paths are recognizable contemporary types. Most of us have even shared a lot of their fantasies. Their world, however cockeyed, is our world. Without abandoning the private demi-demons that have been the basis of his past comic success, Allen has fashioned broad new connections with his audience. Ironically, his most personal film may turn out to have the widest appeal of all his movies. Richard Schickel...
Keaton's whole career, in fact, has been spent in convincing herself-nobody else ever seems to have doubted her -that she is a gifted actress. In 1968, when she auditioned for the original Broadway version of Play It Again, Sam, Allen's comic tribute to Humphrey Bogart, she was, she says with double underlining, "just sick. There were all these other women there to try out for the part, and I was scared to death." And she probably could not have walked on to do her bit-if it wasn't so obvious that Allen...