Not very obvious casting ... Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor play Londoners in Cassandra's Dream
How bad was Woody Allen's Scoop? I ask because, like Simon Hattenstone, I've seen his new film Cassandra's Dream and it surely cannot be as bad as that. Yet Cassandra's Dream is released in the UK on May 23 and Scoop, despite starring Scarlett Johansson and being set in London, didn't even come out on DVD here.
If you have any fondness for the golden age of Woody Allen, from 1972's Play it Again, Sam through to 1994's Bullets Over Broadway, Cassandra's Dream is a bleak experience. How do I not like Cassandra's Dream? Let me count the ways. A Scot and an Irishman, (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell) play brothers with London accents. The dialogue is clunkier than a pair of Frankenstein's monster's boots. Despite being a thriller it singularly fails to grip.
But most of all there are no jokes. Zero funnies. Zilch one-liners. I know that Woody has long wanted to be Brooklyn's very own Bergman, but he usually sticks in some signature rib-ticklers just to maintain his averages. Even his last UK release Match Point raised a few smiles.
Woody seems to have lost the plot in a big way here. Near contemporaries such as Scorsese and Mike Leigh are pretty consistent. Then there are veterans such as Sidney Lumet or Brian De Palma, who have good and bad years. Woody's career, on the other hand, seems to have been losing momentum ever since he stopped appearing in his own movies.
Is there any hope of recovery? Well, maybe. His follow-up to Cassandra's Dream, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, was screened at Cannes and reasonably received. But there is a distinct risk that the 72-year-old auteur really did write his own epitaph with that famously self-mocking line in Stardust Memories when a woman tells Allen's fictional moviemaker Sandy that she loves his movies, especially the "early funny ones".
Yet wait. The real glimmer comes with the news that his currently untitled next project has been shot in New York. Not only is he back on home turf, but it is a comedy. Not only that, but Allen is in it himself. And not only that, but (be still my beating heart) he co-stars with Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David, who has pretty much inherited Allen's mantle as US humour's nabob of neurosis. I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but if Allen can't get guffaws out of a scenario like that then he really is sunk.
