Parents' Guide to Anything Else

This is a weak little whisper of a movie in which the writer-director steals from his own previous, better movies. Allen appears in a supporting role. The nebbish Romeo in pursuit of women, usually played by Allen himself when he was younger, is played here by Biggs, in a painful imitation of Allen's patented style (a stunt also required of Kenenth Branagh in the 1998 Celebrity). Every utterance is peppered with halting, unmotivated ums, hesitations, repetitions, and other signs of irritating passive-aggressiveness. It's the same I'm-a-harmless-guy, can-I-have-sex-with-you approach that appears in almost every Allen movie. This movie also echoes other motifs used to better effect in, for example, Annie Hall (a guy loves a woman but because of their clashing neuroses, they can't make it work), a movie he made 26 years before.

Here, a character is comically hypersensitive to dog whistles of antisemitism that he hears everywhere. He's adamant that because Jerry is a "member of one of the most persecuted minorities in history," he must own a gun to protect himself against Nazis. Allen also sets up the Chekhovian gun that must go off later in the story, off screen in this case. The jokes are labored and land with a fizzle. When a woman gets her boyfriend a book, she notes that she had trouble deciding on which author to pick. "I couldn't decide whose nihilistic pessimism would make you happier."