Radio Days Movie Review

In this lighter-than-air outing from Woody Allen, he recalls his fondness for the radio as a child, an appliance that was "always on" in his home as a kid. Most of my generation could write a Television Days, of course, but the magic of radio would vanish into infomercials, talk shows, and awful sitcoms... it just wouldn't carry the same punch.

The film is a series of vignettes, clearly drawn from Allen's days as a youngster, and only tangentially interrelated. It's almost overly upbeat -- to the point where you wish Woody would get a little more miserable from time to time.

It's the ensemble that makes the film -- while Mia Farrow and Julie Kavner take center stage, cameos range from Tito Puente to Don Pardo, with a very young Seth Green playing the Woody Allen character as a kid. The stories they inhabit are amusing (kid steals from an Israeli charity fund to buy a secret decoder ring, cigarette girl balances multiple affairs) but hardly serious, which makes the film a nice respite from some of Allen's more daunting think pieces.

Recommended.