Woody Allen's Best When He's Neither Seen Nor Heard

Yesterday I showed my Movie Club The Purple Rose of Cairo, a Woody Allen movie.  We loved it and all agreed that his movies are best when he's not in them at all.

Allen's presence can be very distracting, since he's always the same persona, even his voice when he narrated Radio Days and had a little kid play him as a child.  Thankfully, there's no Woody Allen character in Purple Rose... and that makes a big difference.   It's pure theater of the absurd, cinema style, mixing reality and fantasy and playing it all very straight. 

A miserable, abused wife, Mia Farrow, finds herself courted by a movie character who has somehow left the screen.  None of us left our seats, as we watched enchanted.