FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead

Even at 70, Woody Allen is still producing a movie a year. Scoop, a lighthearted, contemporary comedy about a newspaperman who comes back from the dead to help a hungry media student solve a serial killer mystery, is, like last year’s Match Point, also set in London.
Scoop is far from Allen’s best, but it’s still good fun. It has many hallmarks of a Woody Allen comedy, including a beautiful, myopic heroine Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson in ditzy blonde mode) and Allen himself, cast as a lugubrious magician called Splendini.
During a disappearing act, the spirit of a hack appears to Sondra and tells her to pursue the biggest scoop of the century. He reveals that a dashing artistocrat (Hugh Jackman) is London’s “Tarot Card Serial Killer,” but there is no evidence to prove it.
Sondra enrolls the reluctant Splendini in the hunt, involving various farcical antics, as they slip with surprising ease into Lyman’s upper crust social circle, but things get complicated when the wannabe newshound falls for the subject of her story.
The deadly theme may sound dark and macabre, but Scoop is anything but. Death hath no sting, and, in fact, the journo, who gets his scoop while on the ferry to the afterlife, continually evades the Grim Reaper to ensure that his scoop is followed up.
An enjoyable, frivolous jaunt, the film is rife with Allen’s wisecracks, the American abroad variety in particular. The elegant settings of the London and English countryside and the stiff upper lips of the aristocratic milieu provide a nice backdrop for Allen’s cracks, while Johansson proves a good comedic sport.
Occasionally however, the film’s momentum sags. Either Allen was on autopilot when structuring the plot or he is deliberately sending up the formula of the English murder mystery, with the result that the plot is limp as a wilted lettuce leaf. At times, that’s funny. At other times, especially in the denouement, you are left wanting more.
Allen’s twittering character also plays the insincerity card for laughs once too often. These would be crippling deficiencies, but Allen does enough to keep things rippling along in a sufficiently lighthearted way that you leave the cinema feeling that it’s good to laugh.
Much has been said about the Vietnam war, but the GI-anti-war movement has largely disappeared from the collective memory. Sir! No Sir! posits that the US stopped waging war in Vietnam because the men drafted to do the fighting decided they’d had enough.
This timely film, with obvious parallels to Iraq, provides numerous facts to substantiate its claim, including firsthand accounts by many veterans, then and now. There is also some tremendous archived footage from the era, including a young “Hanoi Jane” Fonda performing for the troops.
According to Pentagon figures, there were half a million deserters during the Vietnam era. Many of them opted out of the war for reasons of conscience, and as Sir! No Sir! is keen to point out, desertion was anything but taking the easy way out.
At the time of writing, the documentary is playing at the Ridge. The DVD is available at www.sirnosir.com and 500 free copies are being given away to active duty and deployed soldiers.
Do you recognize these lyrics?
And the battle’s just begun/There’s many lost, but tell me who has won?
The trench is dug within our hearts/And mothers, children, brothers, sisters/Torn apart!
George W. Bush sings them in a web video mash-up of U2’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday, originally written in response to the, Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland in 1972.
I’ve seen several of these cut- and-paste video clips of George Jr., and this one, which appears to exclusively use video footage from one of his addresses to Congress, is the best I’ve seen yet.
It would be funny if it weren’t so disturbing. I’ve posted it to www.youneverbikealone.com/bloodbush/.

Robert Alstead is currently making a cycling documentary entitled You Never Bike Alone.
www.youneverbikealone.com/.