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Woody Allen is (pick one):
And the correct answer is D. How can one guy be a genius AND boring? Read any twenty pages of Goethe's Faust and then get back to me. It is possible to simultaneously achieve both, as anyone who's ever attended an upper-level college lecture will attest.
Allen is, at heart, all about Allen. It's silly to see this Jewish nebbish with all these hot young babes, even if his relationships inevitably self-destruct, usually sooner than later. I realize any horny self-directing auteur will always cast today's nubile Hollywood hottie as his love interest, but that doesn't mean it's believable � or even watchable.
And his movies aren't aging well. I see them now, in the early 21st century, with a mixture of pity and boredom. He comes off as a whiny pedant, which was somehow much cuter in the '70s before Dennis Miller raised the bar.
Allen plays Allen (hmm, there's a character stretch), a movie buff who turns to a literal incarnation of Humphrey Bogart to steel himself during his interminable relationship misadventures. Maybe it's a modestly cute plot device, but making a reference to Citizen Kane doesn't make ya Orson Wells. That Allen steals the final scene from Casablanca only makes his self-conscious paean more overtly embarrassing and disappointing by contrast.
Bananas, Sleeper, and all his early comedies are now just goofy and stupid. His most acclaimed effort, Annie Hall, is altogether too precious. And his later efforts, many in black and white, are too much Fellini and too little Spielberg.
Play It Again, Sam is classic Woody Allen, portraying existentialist man lost in the chaos of the latter days of the 20th Century. Who cares?�
A. A comic and directing genius
B. His ex-stepdaughter's lover
C. A ponderous waste of time
D. All of the above.