Crimes and Misdemeanors Movie Reviews

Sounds like something out of Shakespeare. I was zombied out past midnight in my hotel room in DC in 2001, after a very long workday, when the Woody Allen flick Crimes and Misdemeanors started playing on TV. I was only half watching , trying to fall asleep. 10 minutes into it, I was laughing out loud, and wide awake. After the movie was over, I was so fizzy I went out and drove around for an hour, lost my way, made a bad U-turn with a cop right behind me (I wasn't watching). He pulled me over. Then he comes over to say ''I was thinking, I hope she doesn't make that U-turn. Didn't you see me right behind you at the signal?!!''. We were the only two cars on the road at this time of the night. I didn't think a movie, however good, would have been an adequate excuse for such crimes to him (or is it a misdemeanor) .

So I put on my clueless foreigner face, and let him lecture me a bit. He didn't give me a ticket. A review said the film was an examination of the universe we live in, whether it really is a morally ordered one. Whether people get the rewards and retributions they deserve. So much for the main plot, which is about a upstanding citizen trying to get away, physically and morally, with murder. I found the parallel plot about mediocrity more entertaining than morality and murder. There should be more films on that subject:-on how mediocre people are often more successful and vice-versa, success is seen as talent self-evident.

Woody here is a serious film-maker reduced to making TV shorts about the life of the more successful, but untalented Alan Alda who ends up with all the things that Woody wants. A great performance by Alda, by the way. Worth losing sleep over.

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