BEFORE: Linking from "Anything Else", Woody Allen was also in "Shadows and Fog" with Wallace Shawn.
THE PLOT: Two alternating stories about Melinda's (Mitchell) attempts to straighten out her life.
AFTER: There's a germ of a good idea here, but there are internal problems as well. There's a framing device of people telling stories in a restaurant, as in "Broadway Danny Rose", but the first problem is that the stories here are told as fictional, unlike the story in the other film, which the comics were relating to each other as stories about their real friend.
So, when presented with two stories about Melinda (and without hearing the original anecdote that the stories are based on, which seems like an odd choice), the audience's first question might be, "Well, which is real?" and it's quite obvious that neither is real. Of course, nearly all stories in movies are fictional, but they claim to be real, which makes them temporarily real for the audience, and without that, it's difficult to see the point in this exercise.
The hook is that one story is intended as a tragedy and the other as a comedy, but even given that, what's the point? Neither genre can possibly be determined to be "better" than the other, so what's the use in comparing them? Furthermore, there is only one character common to both stories, so if nearly every element of the story is different, what can we learn by comparing them? Perhaps if all of the characters were the same, we could have learned more about what makes a story a tragedy and what makes one a comedy.
I feel somehow if there were more similarities in the two stories, we could have been more able to distinguish what, exactly, each storyteller brought to the table. But without that, I'm left to wonder.
Also starring Radha Mitchell (last seen in "Pitch Black"), Will Ferrell (last seen in "Bewitched"), Chloe Sevigny (last seen in "American Psycho"), Jonny Lee Miller (last seen in "Dark Shadows"), Amanda Peet (last seen in "The X-Files: I Want to Believe"), Brooke Smith, Chiwetel Ejiofor (last seen in "Love Actually"), Josh Brolin (last seen in "Men in Black 3"), Larry Pine, Zak Orth, Daniel Sunjata (last seen in "The Dark Knight Rises"), with cameos from Steve Carell (also last seen in "Bewitched"), Matt Servitto.
RATING: 3 out of 10 Coquilles St. Jacques
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