Great cinematographically but that's about it! the script is the pits!

Rating: 6/10 (19 June 2006)

Okay, this was my first Woody Allen film. I have been avoiding this man like a bad rash all my life because he just rubs me the wrong way but after all the hoopla surrounding the casting of this film (the Kate Winslet razzmatazz), I just had to go see it when it was finally shot with Scarlett Johnassen in the Nola Rice role, in place of Winslet. In case you were wondering the reason for this otherwise senseless paragraph, Winslet's my favourite actress.
Okay, the premise is as follows. A young Irish man named Chris (played by Johnathan Rhys Myers) comes to England and is quickly accepted into an exclusively unique clique of rich socialites with whom he begins to have an affair with one. He is invited to come an spend sometime on the estate of the father of two of his friends (one of whom is his lover) where he meets the stunning American fiancée of his friend, a woman named Nola Rice, played to perfection by Scarlett Johanssen. Chris cannot take his eyes of her from the moment he spots her and his reactions to this great beauty impact what happens throughout the course of the rest of the film.
OKAY STOP READING HERE IF YOU'RE NOT INTERESTED IN MY RANTINGS WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT CONTAIN WHAT ARE CONSIDERED TO BE ***SPOILERS!!!***
If there is one thing I took away from it all, it's NOT TO GET KILLED IN THE UK!!!!!! I mean, maybe it's because I live in NYC now or whatever but, what sort of police department just takes the word of a potential suspect for it like that???? no matter how rich he/she may be!!!!
1. No autopsy was conducted on Nola or the fetus?
2. They didn't even dust either of the flats for DNA residue or prints?
3. The ring wasn't the only thing missing from the old woman's flat, why just because you found a ring on a dead drug dealer would you automatically close a case and not try and use that lead to sniff out the rest of the missing items?
4. No eyewitness reports except for the neighbour who saw Nola minutes before her demise? That couldn't have happened here in NYC! At least 20 people would have seen something, including people who weren't even there!!!!! Besides, that street looked like it housed a lot of nosy type neighbours, how is it that nobody saw Chris (an out of place socialite looking man) enter or leave the building on the day of the murders, as well as the many times he came there to see Nola?
5. As curious and as nosy as Chris's wife was, she never once caught her husband going down to the cellar to steal or replace the shotgun?
6. The police didn't even bother to check phone records?
7. What about Nola's co-worker? Nobody even bothered to go interview her, and she obviously knew about the affair and pregnancy.
8. With a gun as loud as that, you just have to wonder how nobody heard it go off twice is such a stuffy looking neighbourhood and not to mention the building itself. + look how long Chris had to wait for Nola to come home!!!!
9. The neighbour knocks for so long on the old lady's door but never once thinks to call the cops to tell them that it's unusual for her not to answer her door? Somebody who barely leaves the house. And how that loser was upstairs the whole time the old lady was getting killed and did not hear anything is just totally and universally beyond me!!!!
10. Don't even get me started about the diary and its contents.
11. The crime was so sloppy, that even a high school Forensic-Files-Nancy-Drew-wannabe-team of students could have solved it, yet the entire police department for that city couldn't?
12. The maid must have seen something, yet she said nothing.