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.

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.