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Rip Van Winkle from Greenwich Village, up and about in 2173 for "a cosmic screwing." Out of the Happy Carrot Health Food Restaurant and into the dystopian American Federation, sometimes it takes a couple of centuries to rouse a fellow's conscience. "Have you ever taken a serious political stand on anything?" "Yeah, sure, for 24 hours once I refused to eat grapes." On the run, Woody Allen's defrosted alien dons robotic whiteface, discovers the Orgasmatron, battles a giant blob of pudding, and kidnaps the bourgeois poetess (Diane Keaton) with threats of "large and painful hickeys." Entering society is a matter of beauty-pageant brainwashing and adapting to the occasional McDonald's arch dotting the brutalist architecture, deprogramming requires a recital of A Streetcar Named Desire. Dictatorship by a nose, against it the schnook as Flash Gordon. "I'm not the heroic type, I was beaten up by Quakers." Silent-film slapstick in futuristic settings is the lesson learned from Godard's Alphaville and Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, from Kubrick comes the computerized eye's blank reaction to the Allen-Keaton clowning in the surgery room. (Among the ineffable relics are dusty Volkswagens, chattering toy teeth, and Howard Cosell clips.) A frigid Brave New World warmed by Dixieland Jazz, androids who break up their droning with swishing-kvetching minstrelsy, the joy of slipping on an oversized banana peel. Chaplin's giant poultry, Tati's impractical furniture, the Marxian mirror as channel-flipping screen. The revolution is more successful than in Bananas, but Allen is still unimpressed: "What the hell am I doing here? I'm 237 years old, I should be collecting social security." The punchline holds the filmmaker's philosophical précis, along with the title for his next bit of time-traveling shtick. With John Beck, Bartlett Robinson, Mary Gregory, Don Keefer, Brian Avery, John McLiam, and Mews Smalls.
--- Fernando F. Croce |