Continuing our whirlwind tour of Woody Allen's career, we watched Sweet and Lowdown tonight, Allen's pseudodocumentmentary about a fictional '30s jazz guitarist named Emmet Ray. Now, there's a nontrivial sense in which Woody Allen just writes the same movie over and over again, and I think it's impossible to see these repeated relationships and characters over and over in his films and not associate them in some way with aspects of Allen's own life and psychology.

That being said, this is a fun movie. It's something different, both from the rest of Allen's usual style and from cinema as a whole, and I really liked it. I even liked the movie's huge unstated fakeout, which is that there's no such person as Emmet Ray to begin with. Generally, I don't like things like that; in this movie, it works. There's a lot of neat stuff here.

I'm really enjoying my whirlwind tour of Woody Allen.