Woody Allen's new film; Guardian review

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Woody Allen has made a good film. The shock at the Venice Film Festival
yesterday was palpable. After 14 years and as many attempts to recapture his
old magic, the New York director has finally made a film which holds up to
his earlier work. And in another twist which will send a shiver through the
world of Freudian therapy, Allen turns on psychoanalysis in Anything Else.
(...)
As ever, it is Allen's ageing comedian who has all the best lines. But the
philosophical and oddly serious David Dobel is far from the self-obsessed
Allen cipher of old. For a start, he categorically trashes psychoanalysis in
the most heartfelt way. His post-September 11 New York is also a darker,
more dangerous city. Dobel, despite all his literary pretensions, has
assembled a fearsome arsenal of guns and survival equipment in his apartment
ready for a final showdown. Allen said that as a Jew who felt besieged and
had consequently armed himself to the teeth, Dobel was a metaphor for
Israel.

"The world obviously is in a particularly tense state at the moment," Allen
added. "Of course, it always is tense. But at the moment it is even more
exaggerated than usual. The character I play in the movie is a sort of
paranoid product of the enormous tension that rains down on everyone." Yet
Venice is the one city where the notoriously edgy director appears to be at
ease. Allen, who secretly married his "adopted daughter", Soon-Yi, here six
years ago, has given money towards the restoration of the fire-gutted Venice
opera house, and has previously won the Golden Lion. That won't happen this
year, for despite its rave reviews, Anything Else is not in the main
competition. (...)

Whole story: http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1031493,00.html