Woody Allen

Maybe it's the appearance of a gun in the first act that tells you "Deconstructing Harry" is going to be a little bit edgier than your typical Woody Allen film. Or maybe it's Allen's jarring use of jump cuts during the movie's first moments. Or his experimentation with shifting time periods and realities. Or the script, which is among the most angrily vulgar of Allen's career.In any event, none of these departures adds up to much in the way of substance. For all its bite, "Deconstructing Harry" is a disappointment, providing an unsettling portrait of an artist whose gaze remains monotonously self-absorbed, even when it's fixed on a dizzying ensemble of characters.

The genius of Woody Allen is amply displayed on TCM tonight."Groundhog Day" (8 p.m.-10 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2) -- Bill Murray brings an unexpectedly light (for him) touch to this comedy about a man destined to re-live the same day over and over and over again until he gets it right. And what does getting it right mean? That's what he has to find out. Murray's very funny, especially as the realization dawns that this sort of immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be. ABC."Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., WJZ, Channel 13)

Now and then, even the best of us get to phone one in. That's pretty much what Woody Allen does in "Everyone Says I Love You," a movie that seems to lose both its way and its convictions as it wanders along.Not that it's bad. In fact, it's frequently quite amusing as a bunch of charming but over-matched movie personalities uncertainly warble the music of Cole Porter, and others now and then essay a brave little sally into the world of dance. But it'll never make you forget "Singin' in the Rain"; it won't even make you remember it!

Amazing, the things a son can do for a mother when the son is Edward Norton, rising Hollywood star, native of Columbia. He can arrange for limousines to appear curbside and a spotlight to shoot a smoky blue arrow high over the Senator Theatre. He can marshal Drew Barrymore for celebrity juice and muster as much glitter as Baltimore can supply on a Wednesday night.For his mother, who has known better times than now.They sold out the 900-seat Senator Theatre last night at $75 a head for a special screening of Woody Allen's new movie, "Everyone Says I Love You," starring, among others, Norton and Barrymore.

"Coyote v. Acme," by Ian Frazier. FSG. 121 pages. Everything in popular culture is amusing if you observe it through a monocle. And no publication has squinted with more arch detachment - at least until Tina Brown took over as editor - than the New Yorker, which, for 50 years, has made an art of magnifying the smallest blips on the zeitgeist screen until they appear to be big, silly blobs and then winking, "Good Lord, what do you make of this?" In turn, this patented ironic spin on the desperately un-ironic has spawned a thousand college humor magazines, 25 years of "Saturday Night Live," five nights a week of David Letterman, and an army of imitators, all of whom think that if you skewer presidential candidates and labor-saving kitchen devices and throw in a few references to dead philosophers, you're ready for a cool gig writing for "The Simpsons."

"Mighty Aphrodite" is Woody Allen's take on the great fate-haunted, destiny-tossed Greek dramas of yore, and he does manage to come up with something Sophocles never thought of: a tragedy with a happy ending.But what did Sophocles know?The movie is a return to the loopy, not terribly deep mode of parody out of which Allen first hacked his career with films like "Sleeper" (sci-fi), "Love and Death" (Russian novels) or even "Zelig" (documentary). That means, consequently, that it's still a further turn away from the powerful examinations of moral ambivalence that have consumed him over the past decade, as in "Crimes and Misdemeanors" or "Husbands and Wives."

A recent medical study has shown what many fans of Woody Allen movies have long taken for granted: Jewish men tend to be more depressed than the rest of us.The question is why.The researchers at Brown University say it might be because Jewish men are less inclined toward the use of booze. Thus, they don't drown their depression and replace it with a hangover.But there are other theories. We put the question of Jewish male depression to three Jewish men and three Jewish women. Here's what they said:Evelyn, 50: "One theory I have is their expectations of being taken care of are high because of the Jewish Mother Syndrome."

"Forrest Gump" proved that nice guys finish first, and that $315 million at the box office carries a lot of clout, as the story of the lovably lucky, but intelligence-impaired Alabaman on a cavalcade through modern American history won six Academy Awards last night.Besides the coveted and climactic Best Picture award, the movie also won for Best Actor (Tom Hanks), Best Director (Robert Zemeckis) Best Adapted Screenplay (Eric Roth), Best Visual Effects and Best Film Editing.Hanks became the first actor to win back-to-back Best Actor Oscars since Spencer Tracy in 1937-1938.

He doesn't duck it. He doesn't fade, evade, slide, drop, shuffle, shuck or jive."Woody Allen, yes," says David Frankel, who wrote and directed "Miami Rhapsody," in which many critics have noted certain, uh, similarities to Woody Allen's films."

"Miami Rhapsody" is the best movie Woody Allen never made.Tart, loose, fast, piquant and vivid, it's the story of a young woman teetering on the brink of wedlock, whose image of the institution of marriage has been seriously compromised by the adultery-o-rama transpiring all about her. Mama has her boyfriend, papa has his mistress, little sister has her boyfriend, brother has his mistress. There's a good deal of sex in the movie, none of it conjugal.The rhapsody of the title, then, is the game of perpetual musical beds.