Click hereĀ for more content.

While surfing through Amazon Prime content, you never know what you might discover amidst the mediocre original content (which may be why the streaming service is getting into live sports events), direct-to-video schlock, and older movies that are better in your memory than what they actually are.

One recent find is A Rainy Day in New York, the contemporary “romantic comedy” that was initially shelved because of #MeToo allegations against writer/director and four-time Academy Award winner Woody Allen.

This is yet another Allen film in which he has no acting role, but the lead actor — in this instance, Timothee Chalamet, whose college-student character is inexplicably named Gatsby Welles — is Allen’s alter ego, emulating his quirky mannerisms and cadence.

Now this might be cool for an auteur like Allen, but for the audience, not so much.

Chalamet and all the characters, in fact, spout anachronistic dialogue throughout the movie’s 92-minute running time, which is off putting.

The film is not particularly funny or passionate. If you are a contrarian, the movie might be worth watching, however, because it’s so ostentatious, with various unbelievable coincidences.

Fans or former fans know that Woody Allen’s insulated world on screen is primarily inhabited by neurotic one-percenters in New York City.

Allen obviously has made some great movies.

This time around, you might laugh once or twice (and one of those lines is included in the trailer) while watching the alleged comedy. And if only NYC was still as pleasant as portrayed in some of the iconic, on-location scenes.

As alluded to above, some of Allen’s recent movies suggest that he has no idea how regular people live or talk. Moreover, it’s something of a surprise that smartphones even make in appearance in a 2019 movie that otherwise seems really outdated, although nobody uses the texting feature.

Gatsby’s girlfriend Ashleigh (Elle Fanning) plays the ditzy blonde in a way that is totally unrealistic and possibly misogynistic.

One plot thread is real, though: Upon meeting a famous actor (Diego Luna) and the possibility of romance with him, Ashleigh seems hardly hesitant about preemptively ditching her boyfriend.

The resolution of the other triangle, between Gatsby, Ashleigh, and snarky Chan Tyrell (Selena Gomez), is entirely predictable. The opus does have one good scene, that between Gatsby and his wealthy mom, played by Cherry Jones, in which she reveals some provocative details about her resume. How that fits in to the plot is an entirely other matter.

Spoiler: Allen includes a creative swerve when Gatsby appears to lose his entire bankroll at a poker game, but it turns out just the opposite.

Liev Schrieber as a tortured movie director is good in limited screen time. Jude Law is practically unrecognizable as a screenwriter who works with Schrieber’s character.

Allen’s prestige or renown, i.e., his pre-scandal stature, is probably why these accomplished actors flock to one of his films,

Against that backdrop, however, A Rainy Day in New York has received criticism because it features older men making advances on a young women.

Another message, perhaps unintended, is how a college degree (unless it’s in a STEM field) is a waste of time.

If — and that may be a big if given the allegations — Allen, now 86, continues to make movies, they just should be better. It should have nothing to do with age or ageism.

Checking IMBD user reviews (apart from ones that are obviously planted) is often a good idea before you decide to invest 1-1/2 to 2 hours into entertainment.

Some of those reviewers raved about A Rainy Day in New York, others threw shade on it. Here are a few selections of the latter:

the characters, their way of talking, the whole vibe seems like this was set in the 60s or 70s (even 1920s!). I genuinely thought this was set in the 70s until modern cars and cell phones started to appear….The performances are wooden at best, cringe worthy at their worst. The cultural references coming out of the mouths of college age kids (supposedly in today’s timeline) belong to the eighty-four year old Allen’s era…

The pretentiousness of the script, which the actors embody masterfully, has been a constant of Allen for a while now. Difference is, decades ago it was a window into a world and there might have been something universal and empathetic about the characters, now he’s so out of the social narrative still showing a culture that exists only in the echelons of Manhattan upper class…

The latest Woody Allen prefab features the usual tropes dating back forty years of stale and brittle material that lost its wit and incite sometime last century…This is an old man movie acted out by young people in a totally unrealistic manner and without the charm of some of his previous works…Nothing in the script rings true, the comedy is dated and stilted, the romance is non existent, character development is nil…