Allen writes such naturalistic dialogue. Of course, here it’s supposed to be awful…

See?

Melinda and Melinda. Woody Allen. 2004.

I bought a box set of Woody Allen movies (I know; boo hiss), and this can probably be termed late-stage Allen? I stopped following him like a decade earlier, because I felt that all his movies were about the same set of upper west Manhattan dwellers that didn’t really interest me that much. Crimes and Misdemeanors (from 1989) may have been the last one I saw? I may be wrong.

But somehow, I think this is one I’ve seen before. It’s super-meta: There’s a framing story where a bunch of screen writers are speculating about how to make an anecdote into either a comedy or a tragedy, and we get to see the different takes on the different scenes.

Except for the meta bits (which are kinda exhilarating at times), this movie is everything I stopped watching Allen for. Characters I have no interest in and actors that are doing cosplays of Allen’s 70s movies. (Except Chiwetel Ejiofor, who has nobody to cosplay.) This movie has the added disincentive of having a bunch of stand up comedians popping by.

Does the Belgian police really wear those red arm bands? That’s just bizarre.

Are those armbands for real!? I tried googling them but came up blank.

The Treatment. Hans Herbots. 2014.

Eep. This is a movie I bought at random for my one-movie-per-country blog series, but I didn’t watch it because it looked like it was New French (only Belgian) Extreme Cinema.

But I’m giving it a try now in case I was wrong… but I’m ready to bail if it get too grisly.

It starts off with a paedophile frolicking with a boy in a field.

*sigh*

Hm… but is this more of a police procedural? It’s very dark. I mean, everything is risibly in need of more light bulbs: Nurses are working under 2W lamps…

Hey! Almost all the tomatoes like it.

It really is a police procedural. If it hadn’t been for the extreme levels of (thankfully only implied (so far, I’m writing this at the 20 minute mark)) horrors, it could have been a BBC TV series. It’s got all the clichés, with the investigator having his own daemons; the retired cop with the clues; going rogue; ad nauseam (and I mean that literally).

OK, now there’s an autopsy and I skipped forwards a bit.

This is a competently made thriller, but it’s kinda ridic. It’s so over the top. The only way this movie even remotely works is by bludgeoning the audience with the horrors shown and alluded to.

Vegas Vacation. Stephen Kessler. 1997.

So this is part of the National Lampoon “vacation” series? I’m not quite sure how I come to have this DVD, but I think it may have been part of a box set…

I think I’ve probably seen these movies before? But I have no recollection of this one.

I thought it started off pretty well, with quite a few good jokes. But then it just went… boring…

It’s not so much that the jokes are lame (and they are), but that there’s so few of them. There’s even minutes where there’s nothing that can be identified as an attempt at a joke. And when there’s a gag it usually doesn’t land. And you can see how you’d just tweak some of these gags slightly and they’d work.

But it’s otherwise well made, I guess? There’s nothing annoying in the viewing experience.

It’s just not very funny.

I did like the “Guess what number” casino.