Thursday, March 20, 2014

Deconstructing Harry - Movie Review

Watched Woody Allen play the role of Harry Block, a writer who has hit a block. It had some moments, some ideas but most of the time I was wondering why he was flagellating himself and showing us what demons played in his head.

Block has an affair with his sister in law and they make love at her father's funeral while his wife and her husband are out in the yard. What he does next is even better, he writes about his affair, his family in his book in a thinly veiled manner and reveals all the dark and dirty secrets that were kept hidden from public view till then. Now everyone knows of his affairs and  what he thinks of other people, their lives, their religion. Anyway he is a sex-starved chap who cannot keep his relations. Isolated by all his family and ex-wives, he finds that he has been invited to receive an award from the university that threw him out. Hating to go alone he hires a hooker to go with him kidnaps his son to go along and takes an old friend who dies in the car on the journey. On the way he bumps into his half-sister and her husband, both practicing jews, and rakes up stuff about his father and his past. He ends up being caught by the police and thrown in jail only to be bailed out by a girl whom he mentored and her new husband.

The idea of going out of focus was interesting as was the one about leaking all details out in the book. The book from fact to fiction and in the end all his characters gather and honour him for some reason, for giving them life I guess. But Woody Allen grated on my nerves as he played Block and in some way acted out the possibilities of sex in his life. Particularly repulsing was the conversation he has with Billy Crystal on the various types of women he had sex with. Episodic and boring.

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