“It captures the essential mystery, with flair” - Larry Dossey, Author

  Sir Arthur Edington said: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what;" which sort of sums up everything we know about existence. My new friend Renee Scheltema has made an amazing film with that title. It has been called "one of the most artistic, comprehensive, beautiful, clear, fair and visionary documentaries on parapsychology and science."

While many talking heads type psuedo-spiritual films in the last few years have opened people up to new ways of knowing, this film cuts across all boundaries and makes a great leap into the mainstream. This is a film that you can take the most skeptical anti-spiritual nudge to and have them raise their eye brows (in a good way) about what they will find here. Renee takes her own jounrey into the scienctific exploration of what psi researcher Charles Tart calls the "Big Five:"-Telepathy, Clairvoyancy, Psychic Healing, Telekinesis and Remote Viewing. Also featured in the film are many other scientists that bridge the world of mind and spirit such as: Hal Puthoff on remote viewing, Dean Radin on claiviyance, Larry Dorsey on psychic Healing, Gary Schwartz, Edgar Mitchel,  Roger Nelson of Princeton,  Rupert Sheldrake and many other scienctists that are forging a new paradigm of noetic science ( the science of consciousness).

http://www.somethingunknown.com/�

The film's synopsis is:

Is it possible that some people can read your mind, "Telepathy"? or look into the future, "Clairvoyancy"? Why is it that some people can cure themselves while in the last stages of a deadly cancer, "Healing"? . Does mind over matter really exist, and if so, how do we explain this "Telekinesis"?

In the US millions of people claim to ‘see’ distant objects or places "Remote Viewing". Are they fooling us, or do they really see something? Do we have quantum-brains? And where is the boundary between 'real' magical powers and fraud? Can these ‘miracles of the mind’ be explained?

These and more questions will be answered in the quirky feature documentary “Something Unknown is doing we don't know what ” 104’ min by Dutch filmmaker Renée Scheltema, who was inspired to explore the realms of psychic phenomena after a series of curious and unexplainable events happened around her all in a short period of time.

She travelled to the US to meet up with the top scientists, para-psychologists, psychologists, physicians, and doctors within the field of research, like Prof Charles Tart, Prof Gary Schwartz and Dr Dean Radin. Along the way she collects anecdotal stories from celebrities within the field, such as psychic detective Nancy Myer, author Arielle Ford, and astronaut Dr Edgar Mitchell.

Renée found that experiments of today reveal how science is verifying numerous kinds of connections : 'mind to mind'; 'mind to body' and 'mind to world', demonstrating that psychic abilities are part of our inherent nature.

"There are only two ways to live your life:
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as if everything is.
I believe in the latter" - Albert Einstein

A Film that Offers Hope for Sufferers  of Chronic Physical Pain, Emotional Trauma & Addiction
with Cheryl Richardson, Jack Canfield, Bruce Lipton, Bob Proctor, Dr. Joe Mercola & more Discuss the Healing Power of EFT “Tapping”.  To order a DVD of the film go to: www.tryitoneverything.com

A startling new discovery known as EFT, (emotional freedom technique) combining ancient Chinese acupressure with modern psychology, is featured in a new DVD entitled TRY IT ON EVERYTHING: THE REVOLUTION STARTS WITHIN (Try It Productions/ March 1, 2009). Ten participants join EFT practitioners for a retreat that changes their lives forever.  From healing grief, chronic back pain, insomnia, addictions and phobias their profound, personal transformations offer evidence of EFT’s effectiveness as a revolutionary healing modality.
Leading wellness experts, physicians and best-selling authors including Dr. Norm Shealy, Cheryl Richardson, Jack Canfield, Bruce Lipton, Ph.D, Dr. Joseph Mercola, Bob Proctor, Joe Vitale, Dr. Patricia Carrington and more also discuss the healing power and benefits of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) and testify to its astounding ability to transform myriad psychological and physical ailments.
“When I found EFT, I was startled by the results, I knew I had to find a way to get this information into the mainstream. This film shows REAL people getting REAL results. We don’t just talk about what EFT can do, we show how it alters the lives of 10 participants and their results are astounding,” states the film’s producer and EFT practitioner Nicolas Ortner.

EFT (also known as tapping) is rapidly gaining worldwide recognition as a healing modality that offers tangible results. The healing concepts that it’s based upon have been in practice in Eastern medicine for over 5,000 years. Like acupuncture and acupressure, EFT is a set of techniques which utilize ancient Chinese meridian points to relieve emotional distress and physiological pain. It’s a powerful, self-administered technique where you stimulate meridian points by tapping on them with your fingertips – literally tapping into your body's own energy and healing power--combined with verbal statements that acknowledge and address the issue.  
EFT yields remarkable results. In fact, psychologists, healers and physicians are now using EFT to provide relief from chronic pain, emotional problems, disorders, addictions, phobias, post traumatic stress disorder, and physical diseases.

TRY IT ON EVERYTHING chronicles the astounding transformation of 10 “real life” participants struggling with everything from giving up cigarettes to conquering a fear of public speaking. Their inspiring stories unfold before our eyes including:
•    Jodi –who released the pain brought on by fibromyalgia
•    Jonathon—a Vietnam war veteran combats his PTSD and chronic back pain
•    Rene—after losing his wife in a car crash, he resolves his deep grief  and depression to move forward with his life
•    Donna--A breast cancer survivor tackles her insomnia
These touching, personal stories and more are woven with wisdom and insight from some of today’s leading luminaries and experts. This insightful documentary reveals the genuine effectiveness and validity of EFT as a modern day healing modality that can transform the world.
TRY IT ON EVERYTHING DVD features include instructions on EFT and “How to Tap” and a “Making of the Film” commentary. The DVD (and a companion book by Patricia Carrington, Ph.D) is available for purchase at  www.tryitoneverything.com  Running time: 86 minutes

From the desk of...
Jill V. Mangino
President
circle 3 media
30 Johnson Road
Hackettstown, NJ  07840
(908) 637-6022 (office)
(973) 222-1116 (cell)
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
www.twitter.com/circle3 <http://www.twitter.com/circle3>
SKYPE: jill.mangino 

Hopkins Seeks Consciousness over Plot
Review by Alan Steinfeld

Slipstream like the title foreshadowed came and slipstreamed out of the theaters with hardly a notice.  But this was a tour-de-force of our very own Anthony Hopkins.  What marks film as most interesting is that it is Hollywood’s final recognition of non linearity, although Charles Kaufman has been doing this for years. Non linearity, meaning what the French director John Luc-Goddard said: “A story can should have a beginning, middle and an end; but not necessarily in that order.”

But I have the feeling there are very few people who will understand the serious effort that Hopkins intended as this picture’s director. No one else could have ripped the guts out of Hollywood in such an expressive way than one of its own.  

Writer, director and lead actor of Slipstream Hopkins gives us a post-modern tribute to the life a Hollywood player. “It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothings,” which I think is exactly Hopkins’ point--- All the hoopla around major motion pictures, their stars, the glamour --ultimately does not amount to a hill of beans.  But something real exists in the making; in those snap shot moments where we catch a glimpse of human emotion.

 If Shakespeare were writing today he would have said; “Life is a movie.”  For Hopkins, like all of us, we are the actors, writers and directors of the production called “Our Life”.  I don’t think I would be giving too much away to say that the movie ends when the main character dies.

Essentially Hopkins tears up the linear progression - slashes it back together again and leaves all the loose ends dangling.  This plotless plot is about a writer that has gone cracked pot and has externalized his inner world.  Since the writer/star is Hopkins we can’t help but feel we are getting a direct look into his deeper psyche.  In press notes the maestro Anthony says:  “...every moment just slips past.  What is real?  What is fantasy?  You grasp this moment and then suddenly, it’s gone.  I was talking 10 minutes ago but that’s all gone, it’s all a dream.”

In this Slipstream consciousness Hopkins attempts to make a poetic statement about the nature of his own fabricated existence.  In a Bunelian, Daliesque landscape of the mind he jumps between many levels of reality.  For instance:  Stella Arroyave, Hopkins’ own wife, plays his character’s wife playing an actor in the film he has written that he has actually written. BTW Arroyave is a spectacular presence, a real natural talent and beauty, although this seems to be her first film role.
 
To frame it in more contemporary terms this film is a hybrid between Being John Mallkovich and Pulp Fiction. For as both Charles Kaufman and Quentin Terentino have shown that it is not continuity that matters, but the singularity of intensity, passion and expression. Here Hopkins does one better by keeping the whole pace of the film very mundane and in a way simple.  In order to make any sense of the film just see one moment at a time.

This point is especially brought home in a comical commentary when the script supervisor on the film that Hopkins is writing is killed and then haunts Hopkins to be brought back to life or else he will have no continuity.  Well this is exactly what happens as the pages from the script blow across the desolate desert set.

A recurring theme throughout is the reference to the 1956 movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a haunting cameo performance by that film’s star, Kevin McCarthy.  Is Hopkins saying that a life of an actor is like a demonic possession that masquerades as a human being?  It seems his perceptions of Hollywood is exactly what most people have suspected; superficial, ego driven, and self-indulgence.  John Turturro’s usual over-the-top performance seems very appropriate in playing a big shot maniacal producer backing the film Hopkins’ character Felix Bonhoeffer has written and is re-writing.

As Eugene Ionesco said, and this movie is a tribute to his absurdist perspective: “A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.” Essentially Hopkins is expressing his alienation from a world and system of filmmaking that has so lost the value of what reality truly is.  What Hopkins gives us is not Hollywood, but the true life of the mind that is looking for coherence in a chaotic world of plastic fabrication.

For mainstream this is extreme and advant gaard -in the original sense of the word, but as a piece of visual poetics, Slipstream well worth seeing.  Like Abraham Lincoln said about séances in the Whitehouse: “For people who like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like.”


Alan Steinfeld is founder of NewRealities and has been the moderator of many New Life Expo panels. He is also the host of the popular spiritual cable program New Realities and has recently started an online service for holistic events around New York.  Please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Originally printed in the Times of India March 1, 2009

After its sweeping win at the Oscars last Sunday, Slumdog Millionarie  seems like the movie everyone wants, and perhaps needs.  It has all the ingredients of escapist fare from the Great Depression  -- a populist hero who overcomes all odds to get the girl and the money.  There's an added element of self-congratulation for the West: by seeing this movie you can see India without getting your hands dirty or offending your nose, and cheer it on. Cinderella didn't walk through tenements and sectarian violence to reach her prince. But in this fairy tale, a concession must be made to modern realities. Dev Patel is symbolic of India here and now, fulfilling its  wildest economic aspirations while being conscious of the darkest aspects of  social decay and despair.
   
 If we follow the metaphor to its logical conclusion, India will get  the money and the girl by rising above its slums.  Perhaps that's why Slumdog has created an uneasy reaction in Mumbai and the rest of India.  Rising above isn't the same as solving. Many well-born educated Indians have looked westward for a long time, which is easier than looking inward. They know  more about the streets of London and New York than the teeming lanes of the  ghettos in their own city.  This is true, of course, among rich elites everywhere, not just in south Asia. Watching Dev triumphantly cross the social line is triumphant, but it reminds you that there is a line.

(Barack Obama crossed the racial line in triumph, also, but notice how much heat his Attorney General, Eric Holder, took when he suggested in less than polite terms that America needs to be more honest and courageous about the whole problem of race.)
   
 Like fairy tales, symbols can pacify deep anxieties.  India dreams of being a millionaire, but it lives with the anxiety that it's really a slumdog.  Or that the slumdogs will one day rise up against the millionaires. You can read the tea leaves any way you like. Another uncertainty attends the film.  Having been made on a shoestring, Slumdog  managed to outgross any number of big-budget Hollywood
films. Last week it ranked fifth in U.S. box office while its nearest Oscar rival, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was no longer in the top ten.  Brad Pitt, being a megastar, has pulled his film to $122 million, compared to Slumdog's $98 million, but is that really competitive?  Ten movies  on the scale of Slumdog can be made for the cost of one blockbuster that has yet to pay back its cost.
 
 The whole movie industry is watching closely, and the developing world is watching back even more closely.  After two decades of  action flicks with move-your-lips scripts that were primitive enough to appeal to immature male psyches, here is Asia -- via the UK, admittedly -- sending back something sophisticated, poignant, and universal.  It's like the ultimate retort to  colonialism: the coolie and the wallah have more smarts than the sahib.  Indians feel uneasy about that, too.

Will the sahib turn his back and shut them out? Do south Asians have enough self-respect and stature in the world to at last forget that  the sahib ever existed?
   
 We may know the answers in the near future. Bollywood didn't conceive Slumdog. It still purveys mindless entertainment, for the most part,  interspersed with small independent films  that challenge the West for thoughtfulness and freshness. It's not for lack of talent that India  didn't produce Slumdog.  But questions of vision and courage do  arise. Past history and ingrained inhibitions make it hard for  Indian
artists in any field to be as frank and true to life as they should be.  They have yet to seize freedom. The country has yet to shake off its humbling  self-image, although that is occurring faster every day.
  
If Slumdog is a viable symbol, the future it points to is just  being born. An out-of-the-way picture can dare to be universal, which  means that India may dare to be universal one day. The dispossessed people of  Asia are suddenly aware that they have a place at the table where previously  only the rich dined. Both developments are encouraging.  Meanwhile, one can  marvel at the bald fact that a Bollywood-style anthem,
"Jai Ho," won the  Oscar for Best Song, while Bruce Springsteen wasn't even nominated. The first Academy Awards of the recession turned out to be, as one headline proclaimed, the first outsourced Oscars of all time.

Whose Reality is it Anyway: Movie review by Alan Steinfeld

Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman
*****5 Realties points, because of the truth it  portrays.

 
Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part stands for a whole or a material stands for a thing . A definition you will only understand after you see the movie…maybe?

Synecdoche pronounced like Schenectady (at least by the women at the box office) is the upstate, NY town where the move begins.  It is here we find our not-so-happily-married main character Caden Cotard, played by Philip Morris Hoffman, directing a new version of Arthur Miller’s Death of Salesman, (a thematic clue for this movie).   Throughout the course of his life and career we do not just see – Cotard’s personal dramas ranging from the mundane, to the ridiculously, to the highly simpatico and everything in between, but we get to almost live them through Hoffman’s superb talent.

 
But the film is really about Charlie Kaufman, who is probably the most creative, edge-stepping filmmaker in Hollywood today. This time he has truly out done himself.  Kaufman is the only writer/director I have seen that can turn a first rate comedy into an existential tragedy. He has been known to make some pretty good reality sandwiches in the past: Being John Malknovich, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless and Adaptation. But while these attempts were frenzied send-ups of possibilities of the imagination, Synecdoche is a truly epic masterpiece of self-reflection.

 
Kaufman keeps a steady line of narrative flowing through the whole fragmentation of time and space; mixing it up with internal and external realities. Well in this case it is hard to know the difference.  Somehow we don’t care because we sense the underpinning of that surrealistic dreamscape throughout.  This is because during the film it occurs to us that perhaps Hoffman, playing Caden Cotard, a director /writer is actually playing Kaufman, director /writer, portraying himself as Cotard.  It gets even more reflective (some might say indulgent), as if looking into a room full of mirrors, when Cotard agrees to let someone else, Sammy, play himself playing Cotard (playing Kaufman) in the staging of his great epic to nowhere. As Cotard gives the direction to his cast that “you are actors playing actors”, we see other people in Cotard’s life, we have come to know (and like), become characters in that play.  Here we get into levels and levels of deconstruction as everything starts to fragment and multiply like some Medusian serpent head. This escalates until we think: “Kaufman can’t keep juggling with all these pieces up in the air at once.”  And then when we feel he has almost lost it, he pulls the carpet out from under us and throws us another curve. We cannot help from being hooked into seeing into Kaufman’s bewildered compulsive mind state; only to find out at the film’s resolution that Kaufman has slyly turned the tables on us. We come to realize that it has been our reality all along.  Kaufman has gotten behind our  defenses, by revealing his own insecurities. But because of the levels that reflect off the screen into our own mind we see he is really showing us our own ego driven obsession with the world of people, places, things, times and events. He breaks open the head (as it were) to expose wiring of our personality structure.  This is the purpose of great art, no matter how convoluted it may appear, is to see more of ourselves.

 
In watching the film we never forget we are looking at the creative process.  It is continuously being made visible as Kaufman/ Hoffman/ Cotard /Sammy try to navigate the loose ends of this fabrication. The only hold of security that the audience has in this enduring mess is Hoffman steady portrayal of Cotard’s disintegration. By the end of the movie Hoffman looks wasted and so is the audience for having to endure the frailties of his life and loves; yet we don’t want this artfully artificial artifice to end.   We know it must at some point, but only when we are thoroughly exhausted of it.

It is a surrealistic death of a Death of Salesman. In this case we are being sold fantasies of what we thinks life is, only to discover it was all in the making.  And where Cotard and Willie Lowman end in defeat, Kaufman ends in victory in a sort of liberation from a delusional consciousness, which is the myth of Western civilization’s ‘Cult of the Personality’.

 Catherine Keener gives an amazing performance as Cotard ‘s artistic and passionately dispassionate estranged wife.  She should get a supporting actress nomination for this; out of film filled with wonderful supporting roles. Hoffman, like always, is totally captivating as Kaufman’s hypochondriac-tic alter ego self in a movie of altered egos.  Actually at the end of the move you come think that everyone is your altered ego and all our hopes and dreams and unfinished relationships and projects are just like everything else - footprints on the sands of time.  That is if you have spent enough time on the planet to have seen such illusions wash away.  

My only problem with this film is that even though it shows the hurts, disappointments, hopes and fears that life contains; it fails to show the absolute splendor and wonder of it all.  Because it lacks this clear spiritual perspective, it is only a reminder not a wake up call against a desperate life.
 
I have been on a Henry David Thoreau kick lately so I have to add his quintessential perspective about this Kaufman’s exposition: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”  Yes, in the neurotic obsessive consciousness of Kaufman he pieces together the very private puzzle of desperation that reflects the mass confusion of humanity on earth.  Kaufman’s portrays the existential angst, and only partially conjoins the awe of another of Thoreauian understanding:  Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?  

Nevertheless, I totally recommend seeing Synecdoche, New York.  It is a sobering yet disturbing movie-going experience. I do suggest, not seeing it alone. It is too much of an earth shaking reflection of our mundane reality. See it with friend so you can look at each other at the end and say: “What?” or “Oh no.”  

Alan Steinfeld is the founder of the holistic website http://www.newrealities.com A place for mind, body, spirit activities in New York City. He is also the host New Realities television, see clips at http://www.youtube.com/newrealities You can email him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

By now we all know that old New Age cliché’ that “you create your own reality.”  But what are the actual mechanics of that truth? An exciting new genre of film (part documentary and part story); What the Bleep brings home this knowledge. From quantum physics to neurophysiology the movie uses visual effects and animations to inspire a glimpse of a revolutionary understanding about the nature of reality.

The plot loosely revolves around the emotional collapse of photographer Amanda.  She is confronted over and over again with a strange peeling away of the world she thought she inhabited, in order to see a deeper underlying level of existence. Marlee Matlin adequately plays the film’s protagonist, but the brilliant casting of this deaf academy award-winning actress stimulates the viewer to relate to a slightly different perception of reality right from the beginning.

At a critical low point in Amanda’s shifting awareness one bizarre character asks, “How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go.”  In some sense this is the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland, where nothing is as it appeared to be. Echoing this truth and interspersed throughout Amanda’s psychological makeover, is a chorus of scientists and mystics reminiscent of ancient Greek dramas.  Not only is nothing the way it appears to be, what ‘appears to be’ is only a fraction of what is.  Joe Dispenza, one of the scientific authorities in the chorus says that “out of the 400,000 billion bits of information that our brain processes each second, we are only consciously aware of 2000”.   So what the bleep do we actually know? We only perceive what we have been programmed to see, what another member of the Bleep chorus, Ramtha, calls “recycled ignorance.”

The film over and over tries to point out that reality is not what we observe; it is how we feel about what we observe. The real quantum world is subjective and what we make it.  The film shows how objectivity, once considered the failsafe underpinning of Western Newtonian reality, is now seen by contemporary quantum science as illusion.  As quantum physicist Fred Allen Wolfe proclaims (and my favorite line in the whole 108 minutes), “There is no out there out there.”

One of the most powerful moments in the films comes at a Polish wedding that Amanda has been commissioned to photograph.  What is revealed here again through the chorus of scientists are the way we are addicted to our emotions, or rather the chemicals that drive our emotions.  In a hilarious fantasy scene people dance with intravenous bottles of their chemicals suspended on wheels.  Complimented by animation and graphics we learn that every time we have a certain feeling, let’s say anger, that feeling producing specific neuro-chemicals that become part of our physiology.  The more we are angry, or sad or in fear, the more our body gets used to those chemicals. Our persistent dramas make the body crave that feeling no matter how unpleasant.  It is what Dr. Candice Pert, also in the film calls in her book Molecules of Emotion. We become hooked, like a heroin addict, addicted to our emotional fix.  The film implies that if we do not get our triggers for a while we subconsciously look for reasons to get upset or sad or fearful. We all know people who are “an upset waiting to happen.”  

However, What the Bleep doesn’t leave us hanging.  As Amanda eventually learns we can be the quantum observer these inner emotional disturbances. We can consciously choose the thoughts and emotions we prefer and create with intention the experience we desire to alter our reality.  In a detailed explanation, again by Joe Dispenza, we all have the ability to deliberately create our day full of joy, wonder and new experiences, if we just take the time.

One of the main sources of inspiration for the film has been the teaching of Ramtha.  This enlightened teacher, whose 27-year advent on this plane has been a rich source of spiritual knowledge and practice.   Ramtha, as he has been channeled through JZ Knight since 1977 adds his presence to the Greek chorus of voices that contribute to Amada’s world.  A central point in his philosophy is that we are here to make known the unknown.  The film points to this subtle yet powerful implication:  that we, as divine beings, have the power to manifest new realities, if we intensely focus on their potential.

Overall, this movie can be seen as a sort of Rosetta stone where the scientific and the spiritual can support and contribute to each other. As the film comes to resolution it wisely suggests that sometimes a breakdown can be transformed into a breakthrough.  Through Amanda’s new insights about herself and her world we discover that science is becoming more mystical and mystical practices are becoming more scientifically explainable.  In the end, what the bleep do we find out is that, indeed, reality is not what you get from the world -it is what you give to the world.  As the Beatles said, “The love you take is equal to the love you make.”

Even if you can’t perceive 400 billion bits of information each second, this movie will shift your consciousness by at least one viewing. A few avid fans have it over thirty times. Check it out! You might finish the movie from a different rabbit hole you entered.

Alan Steinfeld is the host of the paradigm-shifting television program New Realities. It can be seen on Manhattan cable every Thursday night at 7:00pm, channel 57 or at the same time on the Internet at mnn.org.  For a list of past guests check www.newrealitiestv.com. Some shows in the series can be downloaded at www.emerald-energies.com.  Comments can be sent to Alan at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Q

Film review by Alan Steinfeld


Will Farrel and Radha Mitchell in Merlinda and Merlinda

Instead of making two mediocre movies, the Wood-man has made one very semi mundane movie.  The premise of this (another light-weight Allen psuedo-comedy) is that things can be seen as either a comedic or tragic, depending on the storyteller.  So Woody does both. He gives us the humorous side of life and its depressing dark polarity about the same character, Melinda.  However, the film is neither a tragedy or comedy, unless the tragedy is that Woody is still making bland meaningless movie of upper Eastside wanna bees with pointless lives, and the comedy is…I cannot think of the comic angle, forgive me.  But does Woody know the difference between the two is a better question?
    Like many of his films it's starts at a dinner table in a Manhattan bistro with a party of storytellers, or in today’s language screenwriters, philosophically speaking about the nature of humanity.  Should we think of life as fundamentally tragic or definitely comic?   In what we know of his inner life and in his films Woody’s has been pondering this existential matter throughout his life.  The film is essentially Allen argument with himself.  
The two writers at the table start to play a story game. Wallace Shawn, a double for Woody’s comic side, debates Larry Pine, the tragedian with a tale of a young neurotic Melinda, as the center point of both trajectories.   The plots begin with Melinda; a lost soul, confused, alienated and suicidal.  Comically, on the other side, she is not so down.  Divorced, whimsical, easier going, Mia Farrowesqe in her lighter days.   
Good premise, if it went somewhere.  Sorry to say it doesn’t.  If Woody was in screenwriting school, he would have been sent back to work on development.  (But because he makes movies for himself about himself, nobody is saying, “Hey, Woody, there really isn’t any substance here”.  
Oh yes there is Will Farrell, who is poorly underused as the Woody persona stand-in.  We see that clearly in the scene where he is totally out of line making fun of Melinda’s new love interest, a game hunting dentist. “Did you shoot all the furniture in this room?” One of his throwaway lines that all should have been thrown away.  Will Farrell could have been better utilized in developing his own character, instead imitating the fumbling love-lost Woody Allen of the ’70 and 80’s.
    The good thing that I can say about Mr. Allen is that despite his own current stuckness as a director/writer he has always been able to find the most charming women and bring them out.  Starting out in his early career with Louise Lasser; then of course the ever charming Dianne Keaton; next, the young Muriel Hemmingway; Mia Farrow already self-made; Barbara Hershey in Hannah and Her Sisters;  Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite; and now Woody has done it again.  For Melinda and Melinda he has found the new rising star on the Hollywood horizon.  Radha Mitchell is the one sparkling exception to the whole dull affair of Melinda.  Actually the only reason I am writing this review at all is to mention her. This woman is a jewel in a pile of muck.  She is the hottest, brightest and most talented actress I have seen on the scene in years.  Charming, stylish and intelligent, she combines archetypal beauty with the sleekness of Faye Dunnaway, the sexiness of Sharon Stone and the sparkiness of Michelle Pfeifer.

 
Look for her in whatever you can.  Despite Woody’s stifling direction, she shines here as both the comic and tragic Melinda.  Rahda Mitchell and Radha Mitchell is the only thing to watch in Melinda and Melinda.  
Poor Woody might be time to hang it up, if you can’t go beyond tragedy being someone mentally unbalanced and comedy having the same old two-dimensional Woody foil get the girl in the end.  Lets go a little deeper and tell us some thing we haven’t heard, like what Radha Mitchell tries to do in every frame of the film.  Did I say she is going to be great?  She is.  

Review by Alan Steinfeld, host New Realities, seen every Thursday 7:00pm, channel 57 in Manhattan.   To contact him:   This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it