'I'm blind," says Val Waxman, a has-been Hollywood movie director, in Woody Allen's new "Hollywood Ending." Waxman, played by Woody himself, discloses his secret while directing his comeback movie. This movie production is the chance of a lifetime for Waxman to resurrect his career. Known as a neurotic and a hypochondriac, Waxman shot some mind-bending masterpiece long ago, after which he was fated to make cheesy commercials.

And now he's got the chance he's been waiting for: multi-million dollar financial support, working together with his studio executive ex-wife (Tea Leoni) - whom he still loves - everything at once. It's just too much. He goes blind. So, shortly into the shooting, Waxman is forced to move around the set, approve designs and set up shots for his Chinese cinematographer (Lu Yu) - all the while pretending he can see what he's doing.

You get it: a typical, good - not outstanding, Allen-wise, but excellent otherwise - story framework with all the necessary ingredients. Straight off you know where the movie will take you - from the psychiatrist's office to commercialized Hollywood, from young pretty women, their more handsome, younger and more-successful-than-Waxman husbands and finally back to Waxman's hypochondria. It's that damned Woody Allen cycle again: unhappy love, poor me, not enough fame and back again.

Hilarious occasionally, funny and kind the rest of the time, Allen also extensively uses metaphors in this comic effort; for example, he adds a Hollywood, or happy, ending. And then there's the symbolism of a blind movie director. Allen ridicules everyone from himself to "genius" movie directors who can do it "blind." He makes cracks at both the commercial side of the demanding movie business as well as the outrageously "intellectual" and avant-garde cinema, which are both, in their own way, signaling the end of the medium.