Six things to know about “Crisis In Six Scenes”:
1) Calling it a TV series is a stretch. It’s not on TV; it streams on Amazon Prime. And if we’re going to be completely honest about it, it’s really just a 2-hour movie cut into six 20-minute episodes. All six segments arrive Friday, and I can’t imagine anyone not watching the whole two hours at once. (In this regard it’s not so different from Woody Allen's 1960s-set 1994 ABC TV-movie remake of “Don’t Drink The Water.”)
2) I recommend “Crisis In Six Scenes.” Not everything works, but the plot unspools briskly enough and there are jokes I suspect you’ll want to hear, at least if you’re a fan of the filmmaker’s early work.
3) It’s a comedy, and funnier than the clips and promos let on. I say the writer who gave us “Love and Death” and “Annie Hall” and “Zelig” still has Woody Allen’s unique comedy genius rattling around in his coconut. I found myself laughing aloud more than I did during “Café Society, and I laughed during “Café Society” a fair amount.
4) If you were wondering, “Six Scenes” contains a lot more than six scenes.
5) Miley Cyrus is terrific. She plays a sexy blonde hippie fugitive named Lennie Dale who blew up a draft board office and shot a cop making her escape. (Did I mention “Crisis” takes place in the late 1960s?) Lennie’s grandmother and Elaine May’s character, marriage counselor Kay Munsinger, were the closest of friends, and Lennie ends up hiding out with Kay and Kay’s cowardly writer husband Sidney, played by Woody Allen. Another young houseguest of Kay and Sidney, meanwhile, finds himself infatuated with Lennie despite his engagement to another hot blonde.
6) Allen gets a lot of surprisingly strong comedy out of a running gag about a man who rejuvenates his marriage by paying his wife for sex. It put me in the mind of the best parts of “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex,” and particulary John Carradine’s line about making a man impotent by hiding his hat.
... [Allen] has a voice, and he has not yet lost it. Anyone susceptible to that sensibility will find many familiar pleasures here. …
The San Francisco Chronicle says:
... The fact that he hasn’t spent the past half-century trying to remake “My Mother the Car” enables him to simply adapt what he does best for the so-called small screen. And it’s a good fit. The performances are winning, with wonderful cameo contributions. …
... a veteran filmmaker signs a deal to make his first TV series during the TV renaissance and then squanders it on bottom-drawer material that recalls some of his most dashed-off and feeblest films, almost as if he has contempt for the medium …
... The tone is completely familiar (think Allen in his Love and Death period), and he returns to his triple role as writer, director and star. The stammering, babbling, neuroticism, the wandering off into weird comic tangents — in short, the Woody Allen that many of us knew and loved from his peak film work in the '70s and '80s is on full display. (*** out of four) …
... compelling in very infrequent, late-episode snippets and stacks up poorly against a plethora of current, artistically ambitious half-hours …
12:01 a.m. Friday. Amazon.
