Scoop: a verdict

So, how bad could it be? The answer is pretty bad, almost enough to make a person want to rent out Scary Movie 4. I can see now why it wasn't given theatrical distribution (although the lack of a DVD release still confuses me - surely there's room for more substandard fare out there?). The BBC were showing it on television last night because they helped to finance it, although no one seemed to have much of an imput or even to have looked at the final script for Scoop. The actors seemed to be there, purely so they could say they had been involved in a Woody Allen project.

You almost get the sense that the decision to bury the film was taken for Allen's good as much as anything else ('Jesus Woody, if anyone sees this, you just try to get funding ever again!'). Perhaps now that Vicky Cristina Barcelona has been getting good notices, it was thought it couldn't do any harm to screen it. All of this of course belongs in another, sister, blog called The Speculation.

I'm still just about prepared to give Allen the benefit of the doubt, although I have more sympathy than I did a week ago for this piece by John Patterson. Going back to Scoop, it was just incredible how amateurish, badly thought out, lacking in character development and - most surprisingly - poorly written it all was. Allen has been as important to the one liner as anybody in the last forty years, but the efforts here made you cringe. An embarrasment really - but at least now I've seen it!