lee_eisenberg

One of the rare instances when Woody Allen filmed in California casts him as a washed-up director who gets the chance to direct a prestigious movie, only then he develops psychosomatic blindness due to the presence of his ex in the production. Therefore, he has to direct the whole movie literally sight unseen!

On the one hand, I like how Allen was going back to just being funny with his early aughts movies; his stuff about neurotic rich New Yorkers was just irritating (and sometimes mean). Even so, it's grating to see him with women half his age. He used to co-star with Diane Keaton (definitely age-appropriate), so why can't he go back to casting women born around that time? Someone like Faye Dunaway or Lauren Hutton would be age-appropriate.

Ignoring that, "Hollywood Ending" is an enjoyable if unspectacular work, with good support from Téa Leoni, Debra Messing, George Hamilton, Mark Rydell and Treat Williams.

With "Weird Al" Yankovic having spent the past 40+ years as the leader of parody music, it was inevitable that there would be a movie about him. And true to Al's music, the movie is a spoof of music biopics. Deliberately inaccurate (it depicts Al as debauched while in reality he's probably the wholesomest person in entertainment), "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" assumes that the viewer knows Al's songs and thus can detect the references to them. There isn't a dull moment in it, although I'm probably biased since I learn a lot of pop music through Al's spoofs.

Daniel Radcliffe does a great job as the man himself, with fine support from Evan Rachel Wood as Madonna and Rainn Wilson as Dr. Demento (along with a number of other cameos and bit parts). Anyone who likes spoofs is sure to enjoy the hell out of this.

I'd like to see a jukebox musical (in the vein of "Moulin Rouge", "Glee" or "Pitch Perfect") entailing Al's songs. Obviously it would have to be a zany comedy.

Tony Gatlif is a French director of partial Romani descent. I understand that a lot of his movies focus on the Roma (often mistakenly called gypsies, which is actually a derogatory term). "Transylvania" is the first movie of his that I've seen.

While the title might imply that it's a Dracula adaptation, it has nothing to do with vampires. The protagonist is an Italian woman (Asia Argento of "XXX") who goes to Romania in search of her boyfriend, having a somewhat gritty experience in the process.

I've never been to Romania, and I don't know any people of Romani descent, so I can't comment on the movie's accuracy. What I can say is that it's interesting to see a movie about a culture that we don't often get to see. A lot of the music sounds like Johannes Brahms's Hungarian Dance (to which Charlie Chaplin shaved a man in a scene from "The Great Dictator"). It's not any kind of great movie, but it's one of the few movies focusing on the Roma, so it's got that going for it.