Deconstructing Harry | | Cast : | Woody Allen | | Director : | Woody Allen | | Studio : | New Line Home Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | December 12, 1997 | | DVD Released Date : | May 26, 1998 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), French (Subtitled), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language), French (Original Language), Spanish (Subtitled) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 26, 2005 | | Summary | Journey to hell with your inner demons | Content
 | In a rare case of art imitating life, Woody Allen gives us his comedy Deconstructing Harry, where we meet Harry Block, a neurotic writer unfaithful to all of his wives, addict to sedatives, obsessed with sex and prostitutes; a man who shamelessly offends family members and friends with his books. In a jiff, a classic Woody Allen character, but darker, sadder, more isolated and more immature.
Now, on the verge of a famous University tribute, Harry must deal with his insecurities, bad habits and nerves while he begins a journey where he will interact with dual realities -the ones in his agitated life and the ones reflected through the characters of his books- and will show the audience with very black humor his incapacity to have honest relationships and his absurd excuses to defend his nasty actions. He will revolve in the deepest caves of his destructive side until literally go to hell, as never had done an Allen's character
To recommend Deconstructing Harry implies to warn you that you`ll be part of a sordid world of phobias, obsessions, fear of death, hypochondrias and neurosis, all of this wrapped up with a coat of vulgarity and repulsiveness that won't run out through the 96 minutes of the film.
It's a respectable, intelligent, witty and crude work. Here, Allen has consumed himself as an irreverent. Honest and brutal, he gives us a stellar cast with colorful characters, with Harry as the center of everything. The dialogs are quick, witty, full of cynicism, and will get as many laughs as many stomach kicks. But let's appreciate his honesty, not criticize it.
It's inevitable not to compare Allen's life and personality with his Harry: his ability to create memorable and valuable works, in spite of the scandals surrounding his life, his personality, a little neurotic and lonely. "Why can't I function in life I only function in art"...His willingness to use himself as a joke, his toughness with himself is a hit in Deconstructing Harry, even when it brings him near to self-destruction.
Allen`s creative genius and his talent as a filmmaker once again are here on the top. Just like Harry, Allen's life has been full of chaos and scandals, but he has proved, if anyone had a doubt, to be an exceptional artist. And that's the only thing that should matter to the audience.
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| Rating | | | Date | July 24, 2005 | | Summary | If ever there was a case for retirement, this is it. | Content
| According to everything I've heard, Woody Allen used to make brilliant movies. I rented this one because I remembered seeing a trailer for it years ago, and at the time I thought it looked hilarious. Sadly, upon watching the movie for the twenty or thirty minutes I could stand, I found it to be not only lacking in humor (I didn't laugh once) but actually painful to watch. The first scene in the film features two characters (literally, characters, as we find out later) having loud sex with a blind woman in the next room. They have to justify the noises they're making and cover up what they're doing, so they wind up fooling the woman into thinking they're making martinis. This is something I would have expected from one of the "American Pie" movies, but not from someone who is supposed to be some kind of a comedic genius. "Funny" lines include clunkers like, "My God, you're like a Born-Again Christian, except you're Jewish." Doesn't Allen have anyone to proof-read his scripts for him, and tell him when something's not even remotely funny????
Allen's main character has apparently just written a book that barely fictionalizes his real-life relationships, and no one is very happy about it. In the second scene, one of the women he wrote about (the one having sex in front of the blind woman) comes to his apartment, delivers a hysterical and very incoherant, and EXTREMELY unbelievable, poorly delivered monologue about how upset she is, then tries to kill him. The action then cuts to a flashback (or is it another story?) of Allen's character as a young man (played by Tobey Maguire, who I guess just wanted to be able to say he's worked with Allen) sleeping with an Asian hooker and then getting confronted by Death.
Yes, Death. THAT Death. He must have stopped playing Battleship with Bill and Ted long enough to make a cameo here, because the cheesiness of his appearance is equal to that film, but since Bill and Ted's cheesiness is inherant to the film, it worked for them. It miserably fails here.
The story meanders on from there, featuring Robin Williams as an out-of-focus actor (please don't make me explain that one), Demi Moore as a Jewish (!) shrink (!!) who is attracted to Stanley Tucci (!!!!!!), and that cute kid from The Santa Clause as Allen's child. The editing is as neurotic as Allen's character, and it keeps jumping back to repeat the same images over and over again, or cutting people off partway through their sentences and starting again on a new sentence. It would have been confusing, if at that point I had cared even a little bit about what they were trying to say.
"For the first time in my life, I'm unable to come up with something meaningful, something that holds my interest." So spoke Woody Allen playing Woody Allen in a film brought to you by Woody Allen. He didn't get much right, but he was right on that score. This film is not at all meaningful, and it DEFINITELY didn't capture my interest. I turned it off, wrote this review, and now I'm going to watch something that will actually make me laugh. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 17, 2005 | | Summary | The Woodman in the Raw. Great Stuff. A bit strong. | Content
| `Deconstructing Harry', written and directed by Woody Allen, may set the record for famous name cameos in Allen's pictures, with the added twist that you have famous actors playing the parts of other famous name actors in the same movie, as when, for example, Kirsty Ally, one of the Allen character wives, is played by Demi Moore in a playing out of one of the pieces of fiction represented in the movie.
I have often touted the virtue of rewatchability in almost all of Allen's movies. After all, why buy a DVD or tape of a movie if there is no value in watching it more than once. With this movie, it is absolutely essential that you watch it at least three times to understand what is going on, as the movie freely, and with relatively little warning, switches back and forth between cinema reality and Harry's (the Allen character) fiction. In some movies, having trouble keeping track of the plot threads means this is simply a bad movie. There are things in this movie that may have been done poorly, but the parallel thread lines between reality and fiction is not one of them.
This is certainly one of Allen's two or three most highly biographical movies, the others being `Stardust Memories' and `Radio Days'. It is not even a big stretch to make the Allen surrogate character a writer rather than a film maker (as in `Stardust Memories') since Allen did a lot of short story writing for the `New Yorker' before film making took all of his time. All of Allen's favorite subjects, primarily love, sex, death, Judaism, parents, and creativity are here. Books have been written about the themes in Allen's movies. `Deconstructing Harry' could easily take a book or at least a long monograph in itself to explicate all the ideas going on in the real and fictional threads.
Allen even brings in parodies of classic fiction in his references to both Dante's `Divine Comedy' and Milton's `Paradise Lost'. For good measure, there is a short riff on Bergman's grim reaper character in a reprise from his appearance in `Love and Death'. I will not give Allen too much credit for such an obscure reference, but his visit to Hell (borrowed from Greek mythology) makes Hell seem almost like a fun place to be, even for the damned, if the damned subjects happen to have a yen for a little sweaty bondage. The reference I speak of is to the etched illustrations of Dante's `Inferno' done, I believe by a 19th century artist which provided a lot of guilty pleasures as an adolescent in the grownup library stacks.
While this movie is a thoroughly Woody Allen piece, I did get some sense that more than a little influence from Kevin Smith seems to have crept into the dialogue, as the frequency of strong four letter words is dramatically higher than in any other Allen movie. This is improbable, as Smith's first movie, `Clerks' I think just came out shortly before the release of `Deconstructing Harry'. But, the cuss a minute dialogue does remind one of Smith's favorite character, Jay of `Jay and Silent Bob' fame.
The quality of the filming and editing in this movie makes one wonder whether some of the sloppy transitions within and between scenes were not intentional. One can easily imagine that the shooting schedule was such that you only had Robin Williams or Richard Benjamin or Demi Moore or Billy Crystal for a day or a half a day, so if you didn't get perfect shots of them on that day, Allen and his editor possibly did the best they could with what they had. There is a kind of choppyness I simply have never seen in any of Allen's movies before or since this one. One thing which makes me think this obviously choppy editing is intentional is the opening scene behind the credits where the Judy Davis character is seen repeatedly leaving her cab at Harry's apartment in order to beat on him for including their marriage in his latest published piece of fiction. The differences in the 5 or 6 times this sequence is shown are almost random, parodying, in a way, the opening to `Manhattan' where the Allen character's voice over is working through various drafts of an opening line to a piece of fiction. So, instead of literally quoting `Manhattan', Allen shows multiple attempts at editing the same scene. Another intentional effect that suggests the choppy editing is intentional is the riff that makes the actor character played by Robin Williams to literally go out of focus.
The story is really not quite as neat as the two other biographical movies, even though `Stardust Memories' does contain a lot of ambiguity between the cinematic and the real. It is also clearly not as polished as most of his other movies, especially the high gloss works such as `Crimes and Misdemeanors' and `Hannah and Her Sisters'. In some ways, it has the same manic quality of his very early movies such as `Take the Money and Run' and `Bananas'.
And yet, it is easily one of the most interesting about which to spin theories on Allen's sources and his messages. I would only recommend this movie to someone who is fond of Allen's movies already. I would certainly not recommend it to anyone who has never seen or never liked a Woody Allen movie. But, for the faithful, this is pure gold, and funny to boot!
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| Rating | | | Date | March 25, 2005 | | Summary | I've squandered everything on shrinks, lawyers, and whores. | Content
| This may well have been Woody's last great film. Everybody runs out of things to say at some point in their lives and the line between clever and camp is rather thin. Nothing this good came afterwards, and it may be late enough in his career to make such judgments. "Deconstructing Harry" is definitely a black comic masterpiece. The jokes are diamond sharp and the one liners are as good as anything in his oeuvre. The bit about Robin Williams being "out of focus" is a great example. With Elizabeth Shue, Demi Moore, Judy Davis, and Billy Crystal, this may be the most famous, and popular, cast that he ever assembled. I've heard that his reputation makes it's very easy for him to get people to play in his films. The only thing that bothered me was Elizabeth Shue as it's not believable that she would be with sixtyish Allen for anything other than cash. It's kind of funny the way that his costars became more and more beautiful as he aged. |
| Rating | | | Date | September 07, 2004 | | Summary | Brilliant! | Content
| Definitely the pinnacle of Woody Allen's later period. Funny, insightful, gutsy & honest, it rivals great literature including the best of Phillip Roth.
Odd the number of pantywaists offended by the "foul language" of this film. Same people, I guess, who felt Stardust Memories was mean-spirited. Hah!
What does that tell us? Mainly that far too many viewers have been boobed down by too much television watching from their earliest days. Great film! |
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