. ReviewIn Melinda and Melinda, Will Ferrell does a fine job playing Woody Allen--or at any rate, playing the fumbling, neurotic, lascivious character who appears in almost every Woody Allen movie (and is usually played by Allen himself). Hobie (Ferrell) is an unemployed actor who has fallen helplessly in love with Melinda (Radha Mitchell)--or at least with one version of Melinda, because Hobie's comic story runs parallel with a more serious version of the same plot, in which Melinda falls in love with a composer (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Melinda and Melinda is intended to be a sort of showdown between a comic and a tragic view of the world, but the comic story isn't all that funny and the tragic story isn't all that sad. You're more likely to feel annoyed by these characters than sympathetic to them, as they act more like Martians than New Yorkers their responses and attitudes aren't exactly dated or implausible, they're mostly incomprehensible. The movie is still a step up from Anything Else, Allen's last effort there are a handful of genuinely funny moments, Chloe Sevigny (as one of Melinda's best friends) and Mitchell are particularly good, and the turns of the two-fold plot--regardless of its genre--are engaging. However, these virtues will be best appreciated by those who are already Allen fans. --Bret Fetzer, .comProduct DescriptionRomantic comedy/tragedy written and directed by Woody Allen. Sy (Wallace Shawn) is having dinner with some friends when they begin debating the nature of the tragic and the humorous. Sy, observing that a very fine line separates the two, decides to demonstrate this by showing how the same story can be either funny or sad depending on the way certain elements are handled. He uses the story of Melinda (Radha Mitchell), a young woman with some serious problems in her life. In the tragic version, Melinda crashes a dinner party thrown by old friends Laurel (Chloe Sevigny) and Lee (Jonny Lee Miller). When she arrives, she is under the influence of alcohol and pills, much to the annoyance of Lee, an actor hoping to impress a producer who is one of his guests. After breaking up with her husband, Melinda lost custody of her children and came to New York City, where she became involved with Ellis Moonsong (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a handsome and well-mannered composer whose promises to her proved to be worthless. In the funny version, Melinda shows up dazed and confused at the home of Susan (Amanda Peet) and Hobie (Will Ferrell), who are in the midst of a dinner party. Learning about the sad state of Melinda's love life after divorcing her husband and losing custody of her children, Susan decides to play Cupid and fix her friend up with a well-to-do dentist. However, neither Susan nor Melinda are aware that there is another man deeply interested in the troubled divorcee - Hobie.
