Smug and condescending - which is of course the joke

Rating: Null/10 (15 November 2018)

A movie directed by Woody Allen, who's also playing the lead role. A movie about a neurotic New York comedian, who recalls us with tales about his dating history, while constantly complaining about how hard it is to hold a girl when you're an egotistical, backboneless loser with a misogynistic streak a mile wide. And that's the only joke this film has. The only one.
To be fair, there's more to this movie than its humour. Allen has stated that the film is not meant to be autobiographical, but that's a bit hard to swallow watching the film. It's constantly talking about New York, holocaust movies, being a Jew in modern America, death literature, psychoanalysis and every single other thing that you can pin on Allen.
And throughout this all Singer (Allen) and his dysfunctional relationships are under the microscope. To the film's credit it doesn't try to portray Singer as a hero. The character himself thinks that he's simply misunderstood and not to blame, but the actual film makes it more than clear that the culprit in Singer's case can be found by looking into a mirror. Except when it doesn't. Because there are scenes that shift the blame on society and its way of making people unable to form lasting relationships. Meaning that the film is essentially saying, "Sorry, Singer, but you cannot get the girl because you're an awful person. But it's not your fault, not really. You had no chance of being anything but an awful person." And I don't like that the film is contradicting itself like this.
It also doesn't help that I don't really like Woody Allen films in general. They're simply too snobbish and smug for me. If this movie, for example, was a person, it would be a rail thin wannabe artist, who would look down his nose at you unless you could talk with them about the emptiness of human soul caused by the modern information age in relation to Marxist theory as fulfilled in post-war Africa.
This movie has its fan, as has Woody Allen in general, but I can only hope that I don't wake up one day and find myself having become one.