Annie Hall: Classic or Dud?

'david? you call your teacher david?'

'it's his name.'

'oh, that's, a nice biblical name, right? what does he call you, bathsheba?'

'oh, uh, thank you.'

'yeah, well...you know, she hates jews. she thinks that they just make money. but let me tell you, she's the one! is she ever, i'm tellin you.'

("I'd like to hit this guy on a gut level.")

Such blasphemy! Go away now. ;-) There are a few films of Allen's I don't mind, but I've never been an active fan and ultimately shrug him off.

The Gumball Rally, however, sucked horse knackers.

and search Woody Allen stand-up comic, his stand-up stuff from the 60s is unbelievable.

"See this gold watch? This gold watch...my grandfather...on his deathbed...sold me this watch."

it's all in the timing...

Woody Allen strode into his ambitious period by finally acknowledging his own attractiveness to women--by reversing the humor of sexual embarrassment that defined the early comedies and substituting the pain of romantic longing. Though this 1977 film is snobbish about social fads, its own attitudes often seem narrowly fashionable: the characters yearn for commitment but spend most of their energy on what once was known as "self-actualization." Visually and structurally it's a mess, but many of the situations are genuinely clever, and there are plenty of memorable gags. The perpetual problem is that Allen isn't nearly the thinker he thinks he is.

I mean, it's moments llike when he goes back to Annie's house to smash the bug. Again, maybe it has something to do with my own life, but that stuff is so on the money about relationships in a way that few movies before or after have been.

Love and Death is a brilliant comedy with great gags and great imagery and all, but it doesn't hit close to home. Now maybe if I were a cossack...

I wonder what it would've been like to see it in 1977. I suppose I was lucky enough to see it at a young age, watching it now, every attitude, every joke, every gripe, every criticism has been done to death in a 1,000 ways, but never as good.

I love this movie, by the way. The last time I saw it, I cried during the lobster scene.

"My brother was killed in the war by a Polish conscientious objector."

etc.

"This is my Grammy Hall"
"Grammy? You call her Grammy?" ....
....
"And this is my brother Duane"
"Duane?"

manhattan's better. he hates it of course.

totally! fun fact: annie hall was originally conceived of/shot as a MURDER MYSTERY!

Beyond classic.

and I love star wars too.

(I don't remember the lobster scene . . .)

Marshall McLuhan was not Allen's first choice. Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel were asked first.

ok so call me dumb but anyone want to explain this line?

ANNIE (Smiling) What's so great about New York? I mean, it's a dying city. You read Death in Venice.

What does Death in Venice have to do with New York?

Sub-plot of Death in Venice is that people still go there although there is a disease rampant in the city. So it's dying but still people love it?

I mean whole thing is about death obviously but I think that's what that is referring to. Indeed it's more like a celebration of decay...maybe...possibly.

Joey Five-Cents!

Annie Hall is neither classic nor dud. It is just hopelessly irrelevant.

HOPELESSLY

Shh! Some of us still need the eggs, ok?

It can still be classic and hopelessly irrelevant (although I don't think it is that either).

what the hell is an irrelevant movie? it's not relevant to your life as a spanish fighter jet pilot? it's not relevant to deregulation legislation of the 1980s? what?

i'd like to know what that line abt death in venice means also. i mean if ned's right, that it's at ppl loving a city despite the decay, wouldnt annie then love new york? rather than asking why ppl love it?

The line is there mostly to set up the joke that follows it. He says you didn't read it until I gave it to you, she says he only gave her books with death in the title. Or something like that.

This is true of course! We shouldn't overanalyse but...

I think she saying that people (in the novel) are kind of oblivious to the dangers of the city (or they know about them but don't care) and Annie is saying but we're cleverer than they - we KNOW it's a dying city and we should get out and move to L.A.

And don't forget that later Alvy says "A relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we have here is a dead shark" (I'm paraphrasing here). Which could also apply to, um, New York in the late 1970s, early 80s and so, er, is sub-consciously agreeing with Annie's earlier comment.

I think the "New York is dying, let's get out" meme was big in the seventies, as was Visconti's Death in Venice so it might have been a more obvious parallel then than it is now... Annie = realist, Woody = hopelessly morbid romantic, ie set-up of all Woody Allen films of the period...

They would make a great double bill.

New York (certainly Manhattan) is now essentially dead for anyone except the demographic that populates Woody's urban comedies.

also Aimless, yer a dope.

Aimless might be a lot of things but dope isn't one of them, I don't think.

However your first sentence is pretty OTM.

I love it when they go to L.A.

ok, Aimless' "remock" (as Woody wd say) was dopey.

I've still never been to LA, partly cuz AH warned me about it.

By the way, while I was googling that line from Annie Hall, I came across a great thing. The New Yorker digital reader gives you searchable access to every single issue of the New Yorker from 1925. While it's in beta, it's free - you just have to put in an email address. After beta they're charging but it's good for now.

http://archives.newyorker.com/

dayum

calling this movie hopelessly irrelevant is either dopey or just meaningless. it's not irrelevant, either as a love story or as a film... i mean, i guess if you're looking at it as a guide to new york city living, maybe!

influence in the genre, whether you feel it to be positive or negative, at least proves 'relevance'

also, asking the happy couple how they're doing so well is still A+

fuck a relevance.

and i always carry a sock o' manure in movie lines.

Anyone see it at the Brooklyn Bridge Park tonight? I have to admit there was something magical about seeing Allen and Keaton by the bridge and then looking to my right and seeing the bridge (from the other side obv)

The movie is visually gorgeous
― Sym (shmuel), Thursday, 25 March 2004 08:24 (7 years ago) Bookmark

I'm always cheerleading for how consistently good-to-great American cinematography was in the '70s. Gordon Willis, top tier.

yeah. i am not great with cinematographers but woody did pretty well - interiors is memorably beguiling, stardust memories really well done etc.

anyway i just rescreened this & was stunned; i wonder where i was at when i first saw it, as little of my idea of what it was like related to its emotional punch. as a portrait of the dynamics of their relationship it's incredible, catching how both their idiosyncrasies are at first endearing & attractive & vital, & then eventually the fuel for their downfall.

For me, Annie Hall holds up much better than Manhattan, even though the thing that most bothers me about Manhattan--anti-pretension masking wild pretensions--is just starting to creep in. (I realize Manhattan is a sacred film for many people, so I don't really want to start knocking it.)

i kind of can't remember manhattan that well at this moment, so would probably benefit from catching that again, also (i had a couple of years of telling everyone that stardust was his best movie, i guess pointedly on account of being some kind of connoisseurish b&w alternative to manhattan, though a rewatch convinced me otherwise - though i am very fond of it, particularly its precision meta-referential take on his career, & sequences of it in particular, it doesn't have the rhythm of his best, & ends a couple of times before ending, etc). what was interesting in annie hall, kinda prefiguring love & death, in which intellectual references are quoted for their absurd phonic qualities & for a humorous shift in register, was that to a more restrained degree he's still using those references kind of self-deprecatingly & to impugn others, always as a distancing, complicating thing in communication or relationships. i'm not sure how pretentious manhattan is; the parts that stick with me are those examples of wonderfully human and common reflexive bullshit - don't fall in love with me, i'm broken etc, which, like with annie hall, kinda resonate deeply whether you are woody or not. eesh anyway this slayed me.

also, just as an aside, woody looks so great in this film, outfits & everything - idk if elmo's reading this thread but there were some plaid shirt/herringbone jacket combos that i thought he'd be into

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lshlhnt4SG1qg7mglo1_500.png

Ralph Lauren, ya know

I can't defend Manhattan as anything other than an occasionally amusing film but I've made my peace with the thing.

I love Manhattan. You guys are loons.

Annie Hall is better but polyphonic otm

i love manhattan too but i haven't seen since i was a teenager and i'm reluctant to revisit it pretty much the same reasons i'm scared to revisit catcher in the rye. still it's showing in town soon on the big screen so i'll definitely check it out (if only for the opening monologue and the gershwin). if i can tolerate/borderline enjoy vicky cristina barcelona and pine for the relative quality of 90s woody allen i'm pretty sure manhattan will deliver just fine. do wish he'd make another movie w/ diane keaton. manhattan murder mystery really should be the template - small cast, alda-huston-keaton-allen, maybe switch up the other two parties (maybe throw tony roberts and dianne wiest in the mix) but a doddering nick and norah type series w/ allen and keaton is something i could actually imagine being entertained by, and there aren't alot of scenarios for 'future woody allen movies' i can say that about.

I could've seen Midnight in Paris for free last night and opted to pay to see 50/50 instead...

anyway my POV on Manhattan changed considerably from teendom to adulthood. I loved it 18 but I interpreted it completely differently than I do now

I love Manhattan. You guys are loons.

― polyphonic, Monday, October 3, 2011 3:47 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

Manhattan's philosophy is suspect, but that's not of paramount importance, is it?

anyway, I wish for a sock o' manure on a daily basis

Manhattan's philosophy is suspect, but that's not of paramount importance, is it?

I'm not sure what the overall "philosophy" of the film is.

I prefer to view Woody as the villain of the film, fwiw

manhattan still holds up for me, maybe even better than when i was 18. whatever happened to marshall brickman anyway

I've discussed this before: the ping-pong dialogue between Woody and Michael Murphy in the classroom condenses everything that's wrong about Allen in this period (characters defining themselves and others through psychoanalytic cliches, actors not given anything to do but embody those cliches). And I don't care for the clumsy way in which the movie tries to have it both ways: romanticism and sourness.

But I can still watch it and laugh.

Pretty much the same: looks fantastic, there's stuff that makes me laugh, and I can still appreciate why it was such a big deal at the time. But there are things that make me cringe, and that scene in the classroom is one of the worst offenders.

re: that scene, it's not particularly realistic dialogue but the one liners are all funny ("I have to model myself after someone!" lol)

The film becomes nostalgia in the act of its unfolding, so I've never considered it realistic.

Some of the throwaway stuff makes me laugh: Woody's reaction to Wallace Shawn, when he puts his hand in the water while rowboating, the brown water, etc.

there is a guy in my preschool co-op who, god help me, reminds me of Wallace Shawn every time I see him. He's like 2 ft taller than Shawn but he talks EXACTLY like him, the lisp, the diction everything. it's unnerving.

I like all the bits satirizing liberal fatuity.

Meryl Streep -- the role and the performance -- are unbearable though.

she gets what 5 minutes of screen time? I think she only has two scenes iirc

She makes sure we understand that her hair is doing all the work.

I'm wondering where the film stands in relation to Streep's marriage to Cazale--my guess is that she was making it either just before or just after he died.

this is the Annie Hall thread btw

Can we at least talk about how awful Barack Obama is?

We're reaffirming its goodness.

lol clemenza

i love that scene in the classroom, don't see what's wrong with Meryl Streep either but then i'm in love with Manhattan so any criticism is too much!

Streep's take by the way is interesting:
"I don't think Woody Allen even remembers me. I went to see Manhattan
and I felt like I wasn't even in it. I was pleased with the film because I
looked pretty in it and I thought it was entertaining. But I only worked on
the film for three days and I didn't get to know Woody. Who gets to know
Woody? He's very much of a womanizer; very self-involved. On a certain level,
the film offends me because it's about all these people whose sole concern
is discussing their emotional states or their neuroses. It's sad because
Woody has the potential to be America's Chekhov. But instead, he's still
caught up in the jet-set crowd type of life, trivializing his talent."

I'll remind Ms. Streep that Allen's stab at Chekhov in September was exactly that -- into his neck.

what year is that Streep quote from?

some time in the late 90s maybe? http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/kammer/gossip-is-the-new-pornography/
i first read it on IMDB way back.

I love Manhattan. You guys are loons.

― polyphonic, Monday, October 3, 2011 3:47 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

― Juggy Brottleteen (ENBB), Monday, October 3, 2011 3:59 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

philosophy schmilosophy

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llwy6n7fOX1qbyzufo1_500.gif

What an intense young Method actress.

what a fucking babe

weirdo

And I don't care for the clumsy way in which the movie tries to have it both ways: romanticism and sourness.

― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, October 3, 2011 5:29 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

thats why i dig it! real life tries to have it both ways too, man

the only thing i'll say against manhattan is a lot of the supporting characters are too wooden, too caricatured, but fuck me its a gorgeous movie... clemenza otm about 70s cinematography

Eh. The cinematography freezes the characters' crises like pins through a butterfly.

Streep can shut up now that she mostly plays cartoon bitches (w/ the odd cartoon chef tossed in for flavor).

Annie Hall is intimate, Manhattan tries to have the characters stand in for a class. And they're around, I've seen them, but they don't talk to me.

there are few films i dread like that thatcher biopic looming out there

also, what is so fascinating about a bunch of pituitary cases trying to stuff a ball through a hoop?

ha are there woody allen movies where the characters don't stand in for a class? manhattan's at least slightly aware of it.

Manhattan is totally mediocre at best except for the first 5 minutes when it doesn't have people in it.

I saw Annie Hall recently and thought it very good, often: it seemed like the best of Woody Allen, like the best feature film version you were ever going to get of the thing that Woody Allen does or did on feature film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPh59jOoiEs

you always hurt my feelings pinefox

i think annie hall is prob better, but i mean i don't even like to think like that

pinefox not otm except for the fact about the first 5 mins begin great because they unquestionably are

horseshoe otm... its like chocolate and vanilla... why cant we just appreciate living in a world with two delicious flavors in it

if you're gonna dismiss a film just cuz of sour characters, lotta Altman gonna fall by the wayside.

so we already covered that AH was supposed to be a murder mystery, yeah?

if you're gonna dismiss a film just cuz of sour characters, lotta Altman gonna fall by the wayside.

that's right!

but except for Short Cuts (remember those musical sequences) Altman didn't sentimentalize his sourness.

uh you seen the long goodbye?

No sourness in TLG -- he's having a great time transforming the source material.

so that's a no then

Those loving shots of nude women doing yoga, the security guard and his terrible Barbara Stanwyck investigation, Gould's performance -- none of this is sour!

Plus, it's not like the Chandler material wasn't itself sentimental.

long goodbye's at least as cornball sweet and sour as manhattan. it's an incredibly better movie obv - altman vs allen isn't much of a contest - but the wounded rejected romantic dumb heart at the core of every grouchy cynic is laid bare there as much as in manhattan or crimes and misdemeanors (the lesser allen storyline obv), most of the time altman's cynicism is more jovial misanthrope (or at least misogynist) but the long goodbye definitely has a romantic streak.

I know a cynic is an aggrieved sentimentalist, but I don't see cynicism in TLG, or even misanthropy, which is more obvious in the mid and late seventies movies.

popeye sentimentalizes sourness also, but whatever romanticism is there is due to nilsson.

and such small portions!

wow, i read altman v. differently than you do. i see his films as disappointed humanism, maybe a touch sarcastic. but sour? i think altman's winking at his audience all the time, and the 'sourness' is always bracketed by a heavy dose of absurdity.

(except brewster mccloud, which might actually be sour, but that's only b/c i don't understand it at all)

agree with remy here re: Altman

weird that I have never noticed the complete lack of score/sdtk/music in this movie before.

amazing how breezily this movie blows by, the scenes are all really short but so perfectly sequenced

Interiors doesn't have much music either (someone plays the piano?). He only got the swing/jazz jukebox going w/ Manhattan.

all the good meetings are taken

i'd somehow never noticed that when alvy goes over to kill the spider the photos of him w/ the lobster are framed on the wall.

Gordon Willis rocks

http://www.filmforum.org/images/sliders/AnnieHall702.jpg

Haven't read through this thread, but I can't even believe this is a question.

I can't believe Face to Face isn't available on DVD

Face To Face came out on DVD (but not BluRay) in the states last year from Olive Films.

will be esp revelatory to New Yorkers of a certain age -- the filming locations, in two parts:

http://www.scoutingny.com/?p=5704

thats awesome

spent a fair amout of time in those vanished movie theatres... including an Allen marathon in the New Yorker circa 1979-80.

god I loved the Thalia...we used to cut class at Columbia and go for all day one price movie marathons, and you could smoke in the back! Bliss....

I remember seeing a double bill of Head and Skidoo there, also a Reagan twofer of The Killers and Hellcats of the Navy.

9-year-old Alvy to doctor: “The universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything.”
Mom: “What is that your business?”
For me, the first hour of “Annie Hall” is the funniest stuff I’ve ever seen in a film. The movie line scene slays me every time, maybe because that’s how I feel whenever people pontificate loudly so everyone can hear them.
Hannah’s another favorite. My favorite Woody jokes are the ones that reduce a hugely profound topic to a cheap punch line:
1) Mickey’s father, during a discussion on the existence of God: “How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can opener works!”
2) Mickey: “And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived, we’re gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”

he had a similar line in his early humor prose: "Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Tuesdays."

9-year-old Alvy to doctor: “The universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything.”
Mom: “What is that your business?”

I showed this scene, once a year on Woody's birthday, to grade 6 classes for a decade. (Going right up to my favorite part--"He won't do his homework"/"What's the point?"--which I sincerely believed at least some of the kids would get.) I don't recall more than a couple of kids laughing. I'd then try to explain the absurdity of the scene. Still nothing. I finally gave up and switched to a YouTube clip of the subway scene in Bananas last year.

you sre trying to turn pubescents into 40-year-old analysands, i'm convinced

This is like the ultimate date movie.

spent a fair amout of time in those vanished movie theatres... including an Allen marathon in the New Yorker circa 1979-80.

― Pangborn to be Wilde (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, August 15, 2012 1:20 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god I loved the Thalia...we used to cut class at Columbia and go for all day one price movie marathons, and you could smoke in the back! Bliss....

― Iago Galdston, Wednesday, August 15, 2012 1:34 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sighhhh

I finally gave up and switched to a YouTube clip of the subway scene in Bananas last year.

You showed a scene of an old woman reading WA's copy of Orgasm to 6th graders?

otoh, the Thalia's floor sloped upward toward the screen.

You sent me scurrying back to the clip to check--that shot's right at the end, so it was easy to stop the clip well before that. (xpost)

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/u5aMAoEbFl0/hqdefault.jpg

My friend played little Alvy Singer, and his brother played the kid in Stardust Memories!

whoa!

i was gonna say your friend's brother is seth green but that was radio days.

still that's hella cool.

yeah, Jon did Annie Hall and his brother Robert was in Stardust Memories...great guys.

one of the Bad News Bears played Woodykid in Love & Death

oh man, i loved Bad News Bears....

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/04/annie-hall-40th-anniversary-woody-allen-carol-kane-marshall-brickman

If I'm reading this right Allen ditched an hour of filmed material. I'm sure he did the right thing for the movie but jeez I bet those offcuts are better than anything he's done in the past few years.

Anhedonia: All the Trims

The only remnants of these high-concept deleted scenes are images preserved on lobby cards that were produced at the time to be displayed in movie theaters. One was a basketball game between the New York Knicks and history’s great philosophers, including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

https://breadcity.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/annie-hall-basketball.jpg

lolz

screenplay draft (which at a skim seemed full of extra unused stuff) and tons more here!

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/annie-hall-one-last-beautiful-american-films-pre-blockbuster-era/

i wonder if he'd seen this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6nI1v7mwwA

(from the above Cinephilia piece)

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/5.jpg

I'll be at a 25-year dinner tonight that my board puts on every year. But the whole time I'll be thinking about the Raptors-Warriors game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxahqTnafM8

http://www.cnn.com/2019/04/25/world/universe-expanding-faster-scn/index.html

More unfinished homework.

http://wondersinthedark.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/annie-hall-3.jpg

adding the universe to "sun, milk, red meat, college"

I did not know this

Woody Allen's Annie Hall includes a scene in which Alvy (Allen) and Annie (Diane Keaton) are observing passersby in the park. Alvy comments, "Oh, there's the winner of the Truman Capote Look-Alike Contest". The passerby is actually Truman Capote (who appeared in the film uncredited).

i've read that before, was skeptical

pre-stardom Sigourney Weaver is in it (no lines)

I'm sure I'll get grief for playing anything having to do with Woody Allen in a school setting, but I would always play the expanding-universe scene for students whenever that subject came up (they hardly ever laughed). I got back from a planning today, and the grade 7 class I was in for was finishing up with their language teacher, talking about a poem having to do with large spiders. So of course I thought of the spider scene in Annie Hall.

Didn't have time to check it, but I thought: "Any language?" (pretty sure not); "Any drugs?" (possibly, I think Diane Keaton lights up a joint--I can skip past that); "Anything sexual" (don't think so). All I could think of were two jokes: the spider as big as a Buick, and the one where Allen asks Keaton if she wants him to rehabilitate the spider. Seemed innocuous enough, and students don't know Woody Allen from Toy Story Woody. So I played it. I was right on those three questions, but halfway through he finds Keaton's black soap and makes a minstrel joke.

Jesus...This is the second time this has happened to me in a year (the other a Culture Club video). I will eventually get it through my thick skull not to play anything older than five or ten years unless you check it first.