Woody Allen has often commented that "making a movie is a great distraction from the real agonies of the world." While he's got a point, some days I wish he'd take up model trains or something else instead. You don't make films just to pass the time (unless you're Andy Warhol); you should be driven by a need, an urgency to create.
A quick examination of Allen's past decade or two of films reveals a few gems — "Sweet and Lowdown," "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" — and a whole lot of filler, films like "Scoop," "Celebrity" or "Anything Else," which seem driven more by Allen's need to keep the production ball rolling, or the availability of cast or financing, than by any real passion to tell a story. It's hard to believe that this is the same Woody who said in 1985: "I'm not making films because I want to be in the movie business, I'm making them because I want to say something."
Allen's latest to open in Japan, 2007's "Cassandra's Dream," clearly falls into the filler category. Part of Allen's British trilogy — which began with the excellent "Match Point" and sputtered with "Scoop" — "Cassandra's Dream" features an impeccable cast wedded to a threadbare script, a Hitchcockian tale of murder and money that ultimately fails to take off.