The incredible shrinking legend of Woody Allen.

Anything Else Directed by Woody Allen If Anything Else were well-intentioned, it would be Woody Allen's swan song. Maybe then one might get a wistful feeling from its hackneyed plot. Instead, The Woodman plays David Dobel, a grumpy New York high-school teacher attempting a late-in-life comedy-writing career, who spends the movie giving professional and moral advice to a much younger aspiring writer, Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs). It's a pathetic sight-and-sound experience to witness Allen trotting out his too-familiar jokes about New York neuroses, the same old Manhattan locations and his flat, never-interesting camera set-ups. Photographed at twilight by Darius Khondji, Anything Else feels like a farewell. Call it his "September Song," if that doesn't bring back painful memories of Allen's 1987 travesty.

Dobel seems to be living through Jerry Falk, envying the life he has ahead of him. But Allen's crucial error is not having Dobel reflect on his own life. It's obvious that Allen has not reflected on his own movies. He recapitulates his old films relentlessly (like an obsessive-compulsive repeatedly turning on the water faucet, a friend suggested). A man who hasn't learned anything over the years and is uninterested in learning anything now, he's just spiteful?without the temper that enlivened Deconstructing Harry.

The torch Dobel passes on to Jerry isn't a witty, satirical scold of urban social customs but a crabby, selfish approach to life. (A very different relay occurs in the watchably junky The Rundown, when Arnold Schwarzenegger?winking?passes his action-lug crown to The Rock.) Watching the Dobel-Jerry exchanges in Anything Else is like eavesdropping on a reprobate poisoning an innocent's mind. It's almost a vaudeville routine: one man stubbornly making his way to the retirement home, the other unknowing drifting toward hell.

That name, Jerry, resonates. Dobel, like Anything Else itself, seems so balky and uninspired largely because the old crank's view of the relationship problems faced by New York Jewish neurotics?once thought of as Woody Allen material?has been usurped and slyly perfected by Jerry Seinfeld's hit tv series. Surely Woody Allen knows it. Sad thing is, Allen grumbles on into obsolescence rather than thinking his way to a wised-up or rueful view of the complexes he has worried to death.

Dobel's unexamined orneriness suggests a mad egotism. No longer interesting as a style of urban tension, it's an aberration of the pride Allen takes in his own over-praised habits and biases. He's become a Frankenstein monster?now arthritic?created by the 70s-80s New York media elite. (I guess I'm incensed by the smugness that is now considered venerable.) Rather than wake up to Allen's self-indulgent bad streak of movies, studio execs and critics continue paying homage to him for the class-striving he stands for, the sycophancy disguised by pseudo-intellectual brashness. (Dobel habitually uses big words like "hepitudinous," "tergivisate" and "advantitiously.") But Allen remains blind to the cultural interests of anyone who doesn't live by the dictates of the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

Maybe the oddest yet most revealing joke in Anything Else comes when Stockard Channing, playing a middle-aged woman trying to restart her nightclub singing career, is told "Things change. You know: styles, the cabaret business." But cabaret?a middle-class cultural form Allen respects?doesn't change. It's strange that Jerry's romance scenes with Amanda (Christina Ricci) are scored to the same nightclub standards you hear in Nora Ephron movies. Though young, they're living in a Woody Allen world, demonstrating Woody Allen values.

One conversation goes: "You can't listen to CDs?CDs sterilize the sound." Allen pretends his treasured '78s amount to a moral vision, but it's just attitude. He doesn't openly reconnect with an archaic illusion of the world; that's what Bryan Ferry did on his experimental album As Time Goes By, which resulted in an astonishing work of avant-pop?a Zelig.

Worst of all, Allen's recalcitrance is dishonest. He tries disguising the antique, formulaic neuroses in Anything Else as a 21st-century sex comedy. Jason Biggs is an appealing actor, but he's only here for his commercial association to American Pie, just as Christina Ricci is here for the weird-girl indie status she gained from Buffalo 66 and The Opposite of Sex. It might be high-concept?and interesting?to combine the sensibilities of those films, but Anything Else remains low-concept. Allen simply remakes his 1977 Oscar winner Annie Hall?the story of the mismatch between an insecure male comedy writer and the sick chick who breaks his heart. Ricci's Amanda is seriously unstable?not in a new way such as Diane Keaton made sympathetic, but vague and unreachable, which Allen exploits without attempting to understand.

Jerry and Amanda's arguments echo all of Allen's romantic squabbles. He doesn't realize that couples' dating language has changed (it's no longer about shrinks but acquisition), or that young adults now read Ayn Rand, not Dostoyevsky. Allen is as clueless as he is inflexible and unchanging. Like Annie Hall, Amanda also wants to be a singer. She whines, "But then I hear Billie Holiday and forget about it." The American Pie audience doesn't even care who Billie Holiday is, and anyone older must regret remembering that the Billie Holiday joke came from Annie Hall.

Anything Else isn't a modern modern-romance like Amy Heckerling's very sensitively molded Loser (which showed Jason Biggs' enormously likeable potential). Allen's insistence that the world continue applauding his views eventually taints the film's romantic- comedy potential. As Dobel encourages Jerry to match Amanda's infidelities, Anything Else succumbs to Allen's usual selfishness. He makes humor of Jerry's desperation, ignoring the young man's betrayal of Amanda and his own instincts. Once a great comic force, Allen's vices have finally caught up with him. Instead of Anything Else being a sage artist's reconsideration of the things that used to plague him, he places a joke-curse on the next generation of moviegoers. Clearly at a loss for so much as a title, the would-be American Ingmar Bergman should have called this one Dead Raspberries.