"Breathe deep / Who knows how long this will last...?"
"Breathe deep / Who knows how long this will last...?"
Member since:27.08.2003
Reviews:46
Members who trust:67
If 'Manhattan' is Woody Allen's most aesthetically pleasing movie, with its gorgeous black-and-white wide-screen imagery, then "Annie Hall" might just be his best screenplay.
Winner of four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, Annie Hall, a bittersweet, autobiographical romantic comedy, is the quintessential Woody Allen film.
Featuring all the themes - love, relationships, neuroses, fame, guilt, pessimism, his love of New York (and dislike of LA), death and life - that we have come to expect from a man whose writing and directing career has spanned more than three decades.
Plot summary:
Allen plays the main character, Alvy Singer, a standup comedian. Jewish, born and raised in New York City, insecure, paranoid, introverted, moody, cynical, compulsive, and threatened. As in his previous films, the character is angst-ridden, confused (growing up in a family home situated under a roller-coaster didn't help), searching for love and finding it hard to attain.
He meets, dates, marries, and lives with a series of women in the course of the film, which covers a number of years in Alvy's life. But now rather than portraying the inept loser, Allen plays the struggling intellectual, forever his own worst enemy, over-analysing everything, overprotective, overcautious.
It is only when he meets Annie that he sees himself as someone worth being with. Annie [Diane Keaton] is about as opposite in personality as Alvy as possible.
When he meets her, she's unaffected and vivacious if quirky [she throws around terms like "La-de-dah" and "neat" without the slightest heed for sophistication].
The contrast in backgrounds and interests between Alvy
and Annie provides much of the material for satire in the film.
When Alvy goes to dinner at Annie's parents' home, he is in for more surprises than he bargained for, including a racist grandmother and a weirdo brother (played by Christopher Walken).
It's what happens to Alvy and Annie's involvement as Annie begins to develop her own identity and outgrow Alvy's insular world that constitutes the bulk of the plot and the most touching and truthful parts of the story.
A brilliant split-screen scene shows Woody and Diane Keaton at their respective shrinks ("how often do you have sex?" he: "hardly ever - maybe three times a week", she: "Constantly! I'd say three times a week!").
The movie also gives a scathing look at Hollywood. At a party, a young Jeff Goldblum is on the phone with his psychic; "I forgot my mantra." Paul Simon [one of the nicest guys around?] plays a sleazy Hollywood producer-type, who has dinner with "Jack and Anjelica", and tries to seduce Diane Keaton away from Allen with the promise of stardom.
I imagine the film's more sensitive yet serious-minded tone about an intimate and emotional relationship would appeal to most audiences, not just die-hard Woody Allen fans.
Alvy sums up his romance with Annie when he says to her, "A relationship, I think, is like a shark; it has to constantly move forward or it dies. And what I think we got on our hands is a dead shark."
Woody Allen has been criticised for continually portraying his own real self in films and indulgently repeating variations of the same themes throughout his movies. That may be so, but in "Annie Hall" it still seems fresh and moving. This is no dead shark.
It is Woody Allen's most romantic and most poignant comedy, albeit a neurotic one.
+++ SOME QUOTES: +++
Annie wants to smoke marijuana before sex.
Annie Hall: It relaxes me. Alvy Singer: You have to be artificially relaxed before we can go to bed? Annie Hall: Well, what's the difference anyway? Alvy Singer: Well, I'll give you a shot of sodium pentathol. You can sleep through it.
Alvy questions an old man on the street about his sex life.
Alvy Singer: With your wife in bed, does she need some kind of artificial stimulation, like, like marijuana? Old man on street: We use a large vibrating egg.
In California.
Annie Hall: It's so clean out here. Alvy Singer: That's because they don't throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows.
Alvy is asked to try cocaine
Alvy Singer: I don't want to put a wad of white powder in my nose. There's the nasal membrane... Annie Hall: You never want to try anything new, Alvy. Alvy Singer: How can you say that? Whose idea was it? I said that you, I and that girl from your acting class should sleep together in a threesome. Annie Hall: Well, that's sick. Alvy Singer: Yeah, I know it's sick, but it's new. You didn't say it couldn't be sick.
Trivia about "Annie Hall":
Alvy's [Allen] sneezing into the cocaine was an unscripted accident. When previewed, the audience laughed so loud that director Allen decided to leave it in, and had to add footage to compensate for people missing the next few jokes from laughing too much. Allen originally envisioned this movie as a murder mystery, and that's how it was shot, with a subplot about a romance. During editing, Allen realised that all the best footage was of the romance, so he reedited the film as a romantic comedy. Keaton, Diane's real name is Diane Hall and her nickname is Annie. Sigourney Weaver gives her screen debut, in a non-speaking part, as Alvy's date near the end of the film. Annie's outfits, which caused a brief fashion rage, were Keaton's own clothes. When waiting in front of the movie theatre Woody Allen's character Alvy Singer says, "I'm standing out here with the cast of the Godfather", to Diane Keaton, who was in the cast of "The Godfather". Additionally, one of the men who bothers him for the autograph is played by actor Richard Petrocelli, who had a small role in The Godfather as a thug who protects Michael en route to the hospital. During the classroom flashbacks, one of the teachers writes, "Tuesday, December 1" on the chalkboard. 1st December is Woody Allen's birthday. The film's working title was "Anhedonia" - the inability to feel pleasure. United Artists fought against it (among other things, they were unable to come up with an ad campaign that explained the meaning of the word) and Allen compromised on naming the film after the central character three week's before the film's premiere. One scene cut from the film is a fantasy sequence of Annie and Alvy visiting hell. This scene was rewritten 20 years later for Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997).
========== Further information:
YEAR: 1977
Duration: 1 hour and 29 minutes (approx)
Certificate: 15
Price: £11.99 from play.com
DVD Extra: Theatrical Trailer
Subtitles: English; German; Dutch; French; Italian; Spanish; Portuguese; Swedish; Danish; Norwegian; Finnish; Polish; Englsih hard of hearing; German hard of hearing
---------------------------------- Thank you for reading
Pictures of Annie Hall (DVD)
DVD COVER
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Production Year: 2004 - Comedy - Director: John Hay - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jimi Mistry, Kate Miles, Dougray Scott
Comedy - Original Language: English - Classification: 12 years and over - Starring: Tessa Peake-Jones, Buster Merryfield, David Jason, Nicholas Lyndhurst
Comedy - Director: Richard Boden, Mandie Fletcher, Martin Shardlow - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Hugh Laurie, Miranda Richardson, Stephen Fry, Brian Blessed, Tim McInnerny, Tony Robinson, Rowan Atkinson
Comedy - Director: Gareth Carrivick - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Kathryn Drysdale, Sheridan Smith, Natalie Casey, Will Mellor, Ralf Little
Annie Hallis one of the truest, most bittersweet romances on film. In it, Allen plays a ... more
thinly disguised version of himself: Alvy Singer, a successful--if neurotic--television comedian living in Manhattan. Annie (the wholesomely luminous Dianne Keaton)...
Postage & Packaging: £1.21 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Winner of four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director "Annie Hall" is ... more
Woody Allen's supreme masterpiece. Coming between such early slapstick farces as "Sleeper" and "Love and Death" and darker more reflective comedies like "Manhatt...
Postage & Packaging: £0.00 Availability: 3-5 working days
Winner of four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, 'Annie Hall' is ... more
Woody Allen's supreme masterpiece. Coming between such early, slapstick farces as 'Sleeper' and 'Love and Death', and darker, more reflective comedies like 'Manhatt...
Annie Hallis one of the truest, most bittersweet romances on film. In it, Allen plays a ... more
thinly disguised version of himself: Alvy Singer, a successful--if neurotic--television comedian living in Manhattan. Annie (the wholesomely luminous Dianne Keaton)...
Postage & Packaging: free Super Saver Delivery Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours...
Advantages: Woody Allen dialogue at its finest with universally brilliant performances Disadvantages: If you don't like any other Woody Allen movie you won't like this one
Nardo 13.06.2005 (13.06.2005)
·
Read review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of Annie Hall (DVD)
Advantages: Woody Allen dialogue at its finest with universally brilliant performances Disadvantages: If you don't like any other Woody Allen movie you won't like this one
Nardo 13.06.2005 (13.06.2005)
·
Read review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of Annie Hall (DVD)
![Annie Hall [DVD] [1977]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78522023.jpg "Annie Hall [DVD] [1977]")
Mar 7th, 2004
exceptional by (2%):
very helpful by (98%):
