Am I Missing Something?

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

-Contains some mild spoilers-Whether or not you like this movie seems to hinge entirely on whether you're a fan of Woody Allen's neurotic stand-up persona. I'm a casual fan so I thought it was alright. Nothing horribly wrong with the movie except for that stupid mime. When he get's what's coming to him towards the end of the movie I came close to standing up and cheering, and the lighthearted glory of that moment almost made up for the soul-grating awfulness of every other moment the mime is on screen, which is too significant to discount. Also it feels about ten minutes too long, even for its short length; the movie mainly focuses on Allen and Middler's relationship, and the chemistry between them is perfectly adequate for an old stereotypical Jew-y couple, but the cycle of love and hate between them goes on for too long.

This is a "comedy" that pairs two of the funniest, fieriest Jewish comedians alive. It is about a bickering married couple that works out all their marital problems during a trip to the mall. Sounds great! Get to work. Wait. What is this? This is crap! Fix it! What? You can't? You already filmed it with a second-rate crew in just the past couple of days? What the hell is wrong with you?!I can understand it if Paul Mazursky wasn't as successful as one would think with this film because he didn't want to make the screwball comedy that everyone would expect, but what is so pathetic about this is that there are many moments where the film truly does believe it is being funny, such as the scenes with the irritating mime.Like most modern marriages, after about half an hour you might really want to reconsider your vows with this film, because although it starts blandly enough, you still feel that you can expect the laughs to start piling up, but they never ever do. Not once. Bette and Woody aren't even very good. What do they have with which to work? They can't spark off of one another in spite of generally giving as much as they can to these two-dimensional characters.Overall, this is quite an unnecessary film, a contrived effort to cash in, but with no juices at all except the anticipation of having Bette and Woody in the same film. It's almost unbelievable how bad it is. I understand if one does not trust the almost unanimous bashing this film gets until one actually sees it, because I am guilty of this. Woody Allen, as a writer and director, has never made a bad film. Even his worst film is twice as good if not more than this waste of talent.

Well-regarded director Paul Mazursky's one joke film, "Scenes From a Mall", is a hopeless going nowhere comedy that only succeeds in making one yawn. The unoriginal, predictable script from Mazursky and co-writer Roger L. Simon manages but a few laughs, while the unlikely characters fail to generate any sympathy.This is not a memorable performance from the Divine Miss 'M' either, and while Woody Allen does okay, neither one of them create believable characters. Obviously Woody is better doing his own brand of dry, observational humour while Bette Midler has been better in dozens of other movies. Give this "scene" a miss!Saturday, February 22, 1992 - Video

Someone from Hollywood with a sympathetic heart should gather up all the prints of "Scenes from a Mall" and take a match to them. It would be an act of generosity. This comedy from Paul Mazursky is pretty much an appalling waste of film, and a waste of time for stars Woody Allen and Bette Midler. Allen and Midler play a California married couple 'celebrating' their 16 years together as husband and wife; they share a scene near the beginning in the bathtub, and see if you squirm through it as much as I did. I laughed one time during this atrocious fiasco (where Bette buys a new dress and Woody tells her she looks like his aunt). Otherwise, it's a claustrophobic drag with seemingly no script to fall back on. Everyone is winging it--badly. NO STARS from ****