Woody Allen is a dirty old man.

Yet he’s still funny, in his writing at least. In his screenwriting—eh. I saw “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” last night and it was not nearly as mediocre as his last two efforts, mostly thanks to the charisma of Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz (and no thanks to the too-blonde vamping of Scarlett Johansson). His plotting seems to be stuck at about a 19-year-old’s level and he certainly doesn’t offer the kind of searing social commentary that he did in the olden days. But in this downtime between summer blockbusters and Oscar-worthy fall films, you could do worse than to see this film.

Read this first, though, because it actually made me laugh out loud.