Jhumpa syndrome
Woody Allen seems content to plow the same ground in Cassandra’s Dream as in the superior Match Point and Scoop. It’s Jhumpa syndrome, this obsession with minor variations on a theme. You never for a second buy these expensively-mussed boys as Cockney mechanics and cads. The dialogue is transparently phony, the motivations unbelievable, the lines stagey, the audience snickering. Tom Wilkinson, so brilliant when roaring ‘I am Shiva,’ is wasted as a tissue-thin MacGuffin.
It is Woody Allen, obsessed with how ordinary blokes might be enticed to murder and never less than interesting. But any Woody Allen murder story without Scarlett Jo isn’t worth watching, without drinking in her husky voice while she fondles a wineglass.
Cassandra’s prophecy: directors repeat.
Denby dissents.
on Saturday, January 19th, 2008, 10:31 am in Film › 
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I dread turning into a broken record like that. I wonder why it happens. Can it happen to any artist? Does vigilance even help?
Lead us not into stagnation, but deliver us from ego.
He still makes movies! I thought Woody was banging minors the saudi royal palace.
The Woody Allen nuthugging fanboy: “Leave Woody alone!”
… and btw Michael Clayton was a great movie o)
I echo the 3rd Eye.
I’d not watched the ‘annie hall’ and other such modern classics (sic) but the whole affair with his stepdaughter/ward etc was just too sordid to get my desi mind around. i’ve also enjoyed tom wilkinson’s characters in ‘In the bedroom’ and Martin Chuzzlewitt. from the look of the trailer, he plays a similar flawed person in michael clayton.
Allen has mentioned aspiring to approach Bergman in quantity — modestly admitting that he won’t match the Swede’s quality. He should perhaps be smart enough to take a page from Bergman’s playbook and realize that he should stick to filming what he knows best: in Allen’s case, the neurotic domestic tribulations of bourgeois New Yorkers. I sense that he doesn’t even realize how far removed he is at this point from “working-class blokes,” that the idea of him giving them authentic voices is slightly laughable. I’m not too eager to see this. At least you can’t fault Jhumpa for continuing to write what she knows.
I’m surprised but intrigued that people are still freaked out by his relationship with Soon-Yi. Given that they’ve been together for 20 years and she’s approaching 40, it seems almost insulting and condescending to her: is she cast perpetually in the role of permanent victim of his alleged lechery?
I also think that Allen’s films managed to make Scarlett come off as talentless window dressing, which is unfortunate.