It's curious how after having been apart for a good many years, Mia Farrow and Woody Allen seem to surface in this movie, playing the central roles. In casting Rhada Mitchell and Will Farrell, the director gives the Mia character to the young Australian actress who has an uncanny resemblance to the young Ms. Farrow, and his alter ego is played by Mr. Ferrell. The best thing Mr. Allen did in this film was to cast someone else to play the role he always gives to himself.

The idea of "Melinda and Melinda" is not bad. However, the situations, even if they are theatrical, at heart, feel fake. The resolutions of the issues in both aspects of the drama, or the comedy, being discussed by some local intellectuals at Pastis, the restaurant, don't produce a logical conclusion. In fact, both stories playing at the same time, have a way of disorienting the viewer.

The casting doesn't help either. Rhada Mitchell, is out of her league playing Melinda. Will Ferrell as Woody Allen, please! The talented Chloe Sevigny and Chiwetel Ejiofor do what they can, but we just don't believe for a moment about their situation, nor do we care what happens to these bunch of pretentious Manhanittes that are one dimensional at best.

Manhattan still drives Woody Allen crazy: Urbanites are prey to ambition and lust, pride and diffidence and even sound like Woody with their halting sentences, paranoid affectations, and occasionally witty lines tossed off like the dregs of their grande lattes. It's a petting zoo of needy moderns who most of all want to find love, which eludes them right up to the last cliffhanging moment.

Alvy Singer and Annie Hall are the best known of Allen's angst-ridden city dwellers, but the new Woodies are every bit as screwed up if not more knowing about the quagmires their marriages and professions have become. The setup is twin parallel stories starting from the same incident reflecting separately the tragic and the comic possibilities.

It all begins with a discussion at a restaurant table among four sophisticates about life being either tragic or comic. Sy (Wallace Shawn),a comedy writer, argues that people need laughter to overcome life's essential pain (difficult to separate Shawn from the memory of his discussion in "My Dinner with Andre"). Max (Larry Pine) says that life is absurd and therefore tragic. So each tells the same story differently about an uninvited guest, one story a romantic comedy, the other a tragic tale of a desperate loner.

Will Farrell as a neurotic husband does the best fax Allen yet in his films. His lines are vintage Woody, tossed-off self-deprecation with a worldly wise guy subtext. One of the best lines comes from Susan (Amanda Peet),a director, who discloses the title of her newest film, "The Castration Sonata," putting "male sexuality in perspective." The Woodman returns in fine form to take on Aristotle and try to fulfill his own hope over a quarter century ago when he said, "If my film makes one more person miserable, I'll feel I've done my job." His tragedy has such ample comedy, I predict you won't be miserable.

Is Melinda and Melinda one of Woody Allen's best? To me, no it isn't. Is it one of his worst? Again, no but like a fair amount of Allen's films it seems to be quite a divisive film, and you can see why. Things considered, while not a great film and with some unevenness Melinda and Melinda is a good film but a love-it-or-hate-it one as well. As with almost all Woody Allen films, it's beautifully made- such attractive locations and the cinematography flows from one frame to the other with few problems- and Allen directs very assuredly on the most part if more in the comedy scenes than the dramatic. The music fits with the atmosphere really well and has a nostalgic and catchy quality to it too. The acting is mostly very good, Radha Mitchell shows that she is as easy in comedy as she is in drama, funny and warm-hearted in the comedy scenes and affecting in the dramatic ones. Chloe Sevigny is another one of the reasons that makes the drama more watchable than it is, she looks very natural and plays with emotion, while Amanda Peet is fine too though underused. Will Ferrell was the biggest surprise of Melinda and Melinda, his performance was by far and away one of the best performances of the younger Allen alter-ego characters. Much better than Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity and Jason Biggs in Anything Else, whereas they were pale imitations Ferrell had charm and charisma and made the role his own in a way the other two did not. Not everybody impressed though, Chiwetel Ejiofor is stiff and Johnny Lee Miller is rather one-note in a quite boorish role. I am in agreement with those too that the comedy here is better than the drama. The comedy in Melinda and Melinda was great, very witty and quotable and a lot of it did make me laugh out loud. The scenes with the comedy are bright and breezy and have a light-hearted feel that is most endearing, and the characters while somewhat typically neurotic are relatively easy to engage with and the spirited performances help. The drama is not on the same level(a surprise really because Allen has shown that he can do comedy and quite insightfully and truthfully and those qualities unfortunately didn't come through),some of the dramatic scenes do drag a lot, the dialogue does sound forced and overwrought and the characters are much less likable and interesting than in the comedy story(fairly unusual for Allen, he has been known to have compellingly real characterisation when he takes on drama like in Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives). The concept was an ingenious one, one of Allen's cleverest concepts actually, and Allen does make a commendable effort in entwining the two stories together even if it did personally feel a little confusing sometimes and the film does feel like one with two halves. All in all, Melinda and Melinda an uneven film but it is also a good and interesting one and in terms of where it sits within Allen's filmography I'd say somewhere in the middle. 6.5/10 Bethany Cox