Film Review: Hollywood Ending (2002)

In Hollywood Ending, Woody Allen plays Val Waxman, a director who develops psychosomatic blindness. He does so as a result of the stress of working on a film which could be his big comeback or completely destroy his career. With the help of his agent (Mark Rydell), he tries to maintain the illusion that he can see, and sets about making the film despite at no point being able to tell what is going on or whether the dailies actually look any good. However, the reaction of his producer/ex-wife Ellie (Téa Leoni) and the growing tension between Waxman and everyone else on set clues the audience in that film is going to be an utter fiasco. Unfortunately, we never get to see the finished product, which is a terrible shame because, while it might have been terrible, I felt like I would rather have watched Val Waxman's The City That Never Sleeps because it would have at least been interesting, whereas Hollywood Ending was not.

Film Review: Hitchcock (2012)

Alfred Hitchcock has the unique distinction of being the only film-maker in history who can be readily identified by nothing more than his silhouette. Through his television interviews and the dry, morbidly funny introductions he performed at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became not just a director of iconic films, but an icon himself. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, his well-crafted public persona, there is still something fascinatingly unknowable about the man, the obsessive son of a grocer who (allegedly) did everything short of torture his actresses in pursuit of realising the images in his head. There's certainly potential for a great psycho-drama about Hitchcock, or at the very least an interesting one about whether or not the themes that underpin his work - paranoia, voyeurism, a fear of authority - bled into his private life.