Woody Allen’s first overt dive into the realm of the serious (though not approached seriously) is an interesting amalgam of 19th Century Russian literature, the cinema of Eisenstein and Bergman all seen through the eyes of his sarcastic horndog persona. It’s an ingenious mixture of homage sweetened with an informed but flippant air of literacy reminiscent of his best New Yorker short pieces. The comic juxtapositioning of a very contemporary New York sensibility into the rich philosophical foundations of the Tolstoyan movement provides a far more fertile ground for satire than Allen’s previous “Sleeper” which merely rubbed a clever jokiness into the face of the most obvious of SF’s dystopian conventions, with a story line so loosely constructed that it virtually ensured his satiric concept would run out of gas.
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