Here’s the description of Ruby Sparks:  “A novelist struggling with writer’s block finds romance in a most unusual way: by creating a female character he thinks will love him, then willing her into existence.”

The premise leaves me cold for oh-so-many reasons.  I’m not saying I won’t ever see this movie, but I keep finding reasons to put it off.

Some of them are the same reasons that I’ve never loved a Woody Allen movie since before Mighty Aphrodite.  What was charming in Annie Hall and only mildly discomfiting in Manhattan with the older, more intellectual male molding the attractive, less sophisticated female became creepy by Mighty Aphrodite and beyond irritating (though sometimes dull) in Whatever Works.

Of course, Woody Allen has revisited different genres and employed a set of tropes in his work over time, and while I love some of his films passionately, there are many that simply do not work for me.  And, this is true more and more frequently as time goes on.

Before you say, “But what about Midnight in Paris?” let me say that to me it was mediocre Woody Allen, better than most of the recent works but not in the league of Annie Hall or Crimes and Misdemeanors or Interiors or…you get the idea.  There were some nice moments but, in the end, the film was a bit thin.

The metaphysical among his films (except Zelig) are usually my least favorite.

I found From Rome With Love less engaging and less thoughtfully conceptualized than Midnight in Paris.