Annie Hall: Classic or Dud?

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