if you 're going to make a two - hour hollywood in - joke , why bother releasing it to the general public ? if you 're going to create a film that will appeal primarily to big - name actors and people who know woody allen , then why waste the time of the rest of us peons by playing it in theaters ?
while watching celebrity , i realized that allen had only marginal interest in creating a story about real people .
what he really wanted to do was continue on his recent kick of conceited self - deprecation .
celebrity is yet another film in which allen tells a story about himself , living in a world that he 's familiar with , dealing with people like the ones he actually knows .
allen recruited poor kenneth branagh to bumble through this picture , in an imitation of allen so perfect that it almost made me like the film more .
branagh plays lee simon , a journalist - turned - screenwriter who divorces his wife , robin ( judy davis ) , shacks up with some hot women ( famke janssen , charlize theron , winona ryder ) , and goes about trying to get big stars ( melanie griffith , leonardo dicaprio ) to read his script about an armored car robbery .
the usual elements of recent allen films are all here , including the sexual insecurity of the main character , lots of self - loathing women , and a tiring continuum of episodes that are only loosely related to one another . unless you work in the film industry or know woody allen personally ,
it 's not likely that you 'll find a whole lot of interest in celebrity . aside from all the in - jokes , the story falls far short of compelling , and the characters are all empty and lifeless .
branagh proves once again that he 's a superb performer , nailing his imitation of allen flawlessly .
the problem is that he 's the same character allen always plays , a character who 's getting more than a little dull to watch
.
i mean , come on
, how many times have you seen this guy ?
-- he hates his work , and he ca n't be satisfied by any one woman , and , at the end of the movie , nothing has been solved .
he brings all of his problems upon himself ( crashing his car because he 's receiving fellatio , and other such stunts ) , so it 's pretty hard to care about him .
in addition , is n't allen capable of creating characters who are n't just like him ?
i know he is , but he did n't do it in celebrity .
the vacant emotional attachment with the main character is not recaptured in the supporting performances .
davis , playing the same woman with low self - esteem that she played in deconstructing harry , has a few touching moments , but ends up the same despicable celebrity - type that fills the rest of the movie .
some of the actresses are saved because of their beauty -- theron and ryder , especially -- but they 're not likable people .
only famke janssen , as a book editor interested in simon 's new novel , has any life .
the men in the picture do n't do much better -- joe mantegna is pretty dull as the man who remarries robin , while dicaprio , as a christian slater / johnny depp - type spoiled young actor , is funny but disengaging .
what 's really insulting about celebrity is how dull and standard its " themes " are .
allen seems to think that he 's making an insightful movie about the way " normal " people look at celebrities .
the main problem with this is that the character with whom we 're supposed to identify , simon , is not a " normal " guy --
he 's just as entrenched in the hollywood image as the rest of the characters .
the other problem is that the image we get of these celebrities is no more enlightening than the view the media gives us --
none of them register as realistic , interesting characters ; they mostly just function as set pieces for boring dialogue .
in addition , allen decides he needs a scene in which the theme is expressed explicitly ( robin , in this scene , says something like , " it 's interesting to see the way we all look at the people we celebrate ! " ) .
celebrity is arguably allen 's biggest misfire to date .
it does have a few good scenes -- theron 's super - orgasmic model character is kind of funny , and the last scene might have been moving had the rest of the film shown us a character or two .
but celebrity is a failure at the core , unless allen 's point was to make a self - indulgent movie about himself and his friends .
if he wanted to make his audience feel like they were on the outside of a big joke , then he succeeded in that .
i , for one , do n't enjoy feeling like an outsider .
disengaging it 's not likely that you 'll find a whole lot of interest biggest misfire to date a character who 's getting more than a little dull to watch the story falls far short of compelling , and the characters are all empty and lifeless a failure at the core the other problem