We felt the same way when we saw it.

About Eschacon08 the manwhocreatedmoseswine writes:

I wonder what the Eschaton crowd would think of Hillary consorting with Richard Mellon Scaife, who seems to be playing namby-pamby with Clinton. My poor head is spinning here. I can't keep up with all this. I think I'm going to go call Woody Allen and see if he remembers my mantra.

Well it's been seventeen years since Scenes From A Mall so I suppose that Woody Allen has forgiven Roger by now. Let us consult The Book of Ebert:

Where it leads them, alas, is into a fog of arbitrary storytelling and desperate gimmicks, sudden revelations and unmotivated mood swings, in a movie that seems to have been written without having been thought about very much. The screenplay - by Roger L. Simon, with Mazursky - creates big gestures for its characters because it doesn't know them well enough to give them small gestures.

What happens is, midway during a day that seems destined to be happy, the husband confesses he's been having an affair. This revelation inspires a series of arbitrary responses in Midler - calm, outrage, grief, rage, analysis, acceptance, a decision for divorce, a willingness to compromise - after which she tells him she's been having an affair, too, and the whole merry-go-round starts again. OK.

[...]

How could "Scenes from a Mall" have been repaired? Only at the screenplay level, before filming began. Allen and Midler struggle heroically with their characters, but there is nothing in this story for us to believe. Every moment feels arbitrary. Nothing flows from genuine human feelings. The mime mimics and mocks the characters, but in the strongly negative feelings he inspires, perhaps he also mocks the hopes of the filmmakers, by dramatizing in a visible way how much the film has been tricked up with gimmicks to disguise the absence of real care for real characters.

So... how long are restraining orders good for?