Bullets Over Broadway is a Woody Allen romp that, as the title suggests, combines gangsters with show business at the height of the Roaring Twenties. David Shayne (John Cusack) is a straight-arrow playwright who plans to stand firm against compromising his work, but quickly abandons that stance when his producer (Jack Warden) finds a backer to mount his show on Broadway. There's just one catch, however: the backer is a mobster (Joe Viterelli) who sees Shayne's play as a vehicle for his dizzy,
talent-free girlfriend, Olive (Jennifer Tilly). Shayne also has to deal with the demands of veteran theatre diva Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest) and is shocked to discover that Olive's hitman bodyguard, Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), is probably a better playwright than he is, as he secretly revises Shayne's work when he sits in on rehearsals. ~ Don Kaye, Rovi
Essentially a backstage comedy about artists and gangsters in 1920s New York, the film doesn't break any new ground but it's pleasantly amusing and benefits from charming turns from Diane Wiest as the grand dame and John Cusack as the young artist.
BULLETS OVER BROADWAY is filled with good, but overrated performances. It's surprisingly slow-paced (and I say surprisingly, because nobody expects a crime comedy to be this slow) and, at only 100 minutes, it feels so long.
On the bright side, the art direction and costume design are superb. Not a great Woody Allen
flick, but his work in BOB is pretty decent.
Despite the fact that I spent the entire movie thinking that Dianne Wiest was Olive and Helen was Jennifer Tilly (of which I feel like a huge dumbass, thank you very much), this movie contains all elements that I love of Woody. The coldness that hits your bones when another layer is unwrapped, cynicism and idealism
jumbled together so that you can't even tell the difference between the two, the subconscious prejudices we build up only to have them joyfully knocked down by Woody's slight of hand, hilarity found in unexpected areas, and the pseudo-intellectual junk always popping up when you least expect it, a welcome respite that always pertains to the subject matter but tangentially at best. All this sounds very ambiguous but it's the movie as a whole that works the best. There wasn't any particular moment that stood out, the movie itself stood out.
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