 I'm Elise Anderson, reviewing the new movie Wonder Wheel. You can't call it a bad film just because it's unpleasant to watch. In fact, when you find yourself despising a character to the extent that you want her to drop off the face of the set, you better bet it's good acting. Kate Winslet pulled off such a feat to murderous proportions in Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel as Ginny, a desperate working wife many have likened to Blanche Dubois in a street car named Desire, who in one person manages to fuse every loathsome trait a woman can embody. Ginny is jealous, superficial, disloyal, crass, selfish, thefting and dishonest. She's a resentful wife, a negligent mother, a conniving confidant, a sloppy employee, and a grotesquely obsessive lover. The problem with Ginny is that she neither changes nor disappears. Instead, she lurks around the screen until the end of the film and everyone else pays the price. Wonder Wheel, set against an increasingly seedy early 1950s Coney Island backdrop, is a picnic for the eyes and ears. Technicolor cinematography casts an electric candy apple glow over the whole film, and an authenticating soundtrack of crooning post-war romance ballads puts us in the right state of mind. People who isn't enough to have been there say that that's the way it really was at Coney Island circa 1950. So while Wonder Wheel has all the makings of melodrama, it isn't too far a stretch from fact after all. And indeed, the film is heavily autobiographical for Alan himself. The infamous director cemented his stardom in 1977 by directing and starring in Annie Hall as obsessive and depressive ruminator Alvie Singer. Singer blames his own psychological state to a large extent on his troubled upbringing in a dilapidated apartment under the roller coaster of Coney Island. Although that roller coaster is replaced in Wonder Wheel by the titular orb, the throwback is blatant. Like young Alvie Singer, Ginny's son, played by Jack Gore, is a redhead. The timelines align. Alvie Singer, being about 35 in 1977, would be about 10 years old in 1952. Like young Alvie, Ginny's son is also extremely troubled and self-aware of those troubles. In this case, he's a dangerous pyromaniac who explains his familial blight and therapy before trying to ignite the therapist's waiting room. Also autobiographical is the film about handsome lifeguard narrator Mickey, played by Justin Timberlake, who falls in love with his lover's stepdaughter. In Alan's case, with longtime flame Mia Farrow, however, it wasn't a stepdaughter, but rather adopted daughter, Suni, Alan's current wife. Parallels abound right down to both Ginny and Farrow being middle-aged former actresses at the time, albeit with differing extremes of success. Woody Allen has said before, as Mickey repeats, the heart has a mind of its own. And this film, defiant against all our protesting cringes and groans, has a mind of its own as well. Or rather, a mind usurped and shared with fictional forebears. But whether original or not, Allen and Winslet re-harness the putrid air for a bang of momentum and punch. Wonder Wheel might be stale, but it certainly isn't weak. Thanks for watching. I'm Elise Anderson.