this seemed half-baked. they had the ideas to have a musical with old songs, old lenses/film/processing/whatever, and a lot of characters, but then they stopped and didn’t come up with anything past that. with all the characters and pretty settings and time passage it seems like they’re going for some ‘ob-la-dee life goes on’ (for rich people) kind of tone, where you just see some characters go through some episodes and not necessarily learn or grow, just move on. but then the end focuses in strongly on allen and hawn’s characters and unbalances things. so at that point it’s trying to be insightful in some way, but all along the way it seemed to eschew any attempt at insight with a bunch of unthinking characters that simply react.
everything that happens is just kind of pleasant, but not really entertaining - allen seducing roberts, the convict’s walk in the woods with barrymore - never really funny just kind of nice. they did do some fun stuff in the songs, but i only really liked it during the first one when i didn’t know what to expect, and the last one with hawn and allen dancing was indeed cute.
