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Shadows and Fog

Shadows and Fog. Woody Allen. 1991.

This is it! The final movie of the Woody Allen box set I bought some years back:

This is one movie I don’t recall… I think it’s from after I stopped watching his movies? Let’s see!

[ten minutes pass]

Wow, this is an odd movie. Sure, it’s a pastiche (and possibly a parody?) of expressionist German cinema, but… just… what? Perhaps it’s just a horrible, horrible DVD transfer, but everything is washed out and awful: It looks like it was filmed on colour stock and then the colours were dropped out? But surely that’s not possible?

And the … performances… Yes, I know, it’s meant to be funny, but it’s not. It’s like a parody in search of a subject.

Ah:

Recalling the film’s critical and commercial failure in his 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, Allen joked that “the filming of Shadows and Fog went off without a hitch except for the movie.”

It really, really bombed.

[ten minutes pass]

It’s got all these famous people… was this movie just an excuse to hob-nob with all these actors?

[the end]

This isn’t a good movie.

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