This presentation is original and clever; very nicely twisted from the Rashamon perceptions of several disparate pasts. As usual, Woody is very perceptive and a master of dialog, especially in fracturing relationships.

I noted that the "comedy" writer was heavily focused on the tragic elements of his plot line, while the "tragedy" writer saw little humor in his plot line. Actually, the 2 writers did not seem to differ very much at all in their views. It does not appear that Woody finds life very humorous. Rather, he finds humorous elements in mundane and sad events.

More obviously, most of the characters sound just like Woody. The comedy writer might as well have been Woody and Will Ferrell is a Woody stand-in. Several of the others, including the women, had numerous "Woody" moments. It seems like the actors and even the screen are interfering with Woody's attempts to present his art. Unlike other directors who expect the actors to climb into the characters, Woody seems to ask the actors to stand still while he paints them as the characters. Would he prefer to simple do a monologue?

Are Life, Existence, and Everything inherently comic or tragic? Woody Allen has never been shy about staring down big questions, and with "Melinda and Melinda" he takes a crack at nothing less than the human condition itself. Presented with the same set up, two dining Manhattan playwrights take us through their version of events according to their world views. An unexpected guest crashes a dinner party; is it the makings of disaster or farce? More importantly, is there really a difference? The Melinda (Radha Mitchell) of both competing vignettes is a train wreck of a woman, and makes both her entrances at her worst. Both parties contain struggling actors and couples with respective career and marital difficulties. In each, Melinda's arrival is the catalyst for all manner of bottled up tensions to come to a head. As the stories mirror one another, then veer away only to meet up again, Allen underscores the comic nature of tragedy and vice versa. As expected in an Allen film, there's strong work all around, particularly from Will Ferrell as a stand-in for Allen himself.

There's very little to offend about "Melinda and Melinda." As usual, Allen is working with ideas, and has made a film with a baseline quality about it that's gratifying. Yet most of "Melinda and Melinda" is trodden ground for Allen, and has seen better days in his earlier work. It's hard to fault the guy for being so prolific; indeed the real comedy/tragedy is how unappreciated he seems to be in recent years, considering his output. But, as Allen himself might say, comedy, tragedy; it's like anything else.

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.