At best it's a third or fourth trip to the same well Woody Allen has already pumped dry; unworthy of the man who gave us Crimes and Misdemeanors, Another Woman, and Hannah and her Sisters.

Rating: 5/10 (15 May 2000)

I goofed up a bit last night: went to see Sweet and Lowdown, but walked into wrong auditorium and watched The Insider by mistake. Ironically, Insider was good, but I'd paid $6 to see S & L so I stayed over and watched that too. Fortunately they're not long movies. S & L was a flat, weary retreading of that period kind of thing Woody Allen does, part Purple Rose of Cairo, part Radio Days, and some of the pseudo documentary format of Zelig. Otherwise it's just Sean Penn's character driving himself from one situation to another like panels in a comic strip, then ending rather abruptly, on the assumption that we've been transported to a different place than where we started, and that Penn's character has realized something about the error of the mean, selfish life he's led. His character consists basically of an overdone accent of some kind, and since, aside from some pleasant jazz guitar performances here and there, he's the show, it's not much of one.