"Oh yeah, THAT movie" -Annie Hall
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 2:41PM 
Directed By: Woody Allen Written By: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts.
Plot- Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) is a grim social observer who enjoys watching Holocaust movies and feeling guilty afterwards. He has turned his knack for seeing the world into a career as a comedian. The movie revolves around his relationship with the strikingly beautiful, Annie Hall. Tiny observational conflicts are the base of the movie as Annie Hall goes from naïve infatuation to a cultured women looking to get more out of life than Alvy can give her.
This movie gave to neurotics what THE MATRIX gave to nerds. Nerds needed a “Matrix” world of fantasy, where there is actually a fabric of awesome necessity underneath their Best Buy jobs. For neurotics and their closely-related brethren ‘intelligent existentialists who hate the word ‘existential’ because normal people discovered it,” ANNIE HALL is a dose of what can be. The trick here is that, unlike “Matrix,” this can actually happen! That’s right fellow needy/weird people who didn’t get any in High School – be yourself and stick to your wit and you too can one day have a strikingly beautiful quirky girl for a short period of time.
As anyone who has ever tried to balance a relationship with a hunger for the human condition, it can be mighty tricky. Annie starts out as just an optimistic beautiful girl who moved to New York, but thanks solely to Alvy, she begins broadening her mind. Unfortunately, the width of her mind is all that seemed to keep Annie with Alvy, since she eventually chooses to do something different with her life, something pointed out through narration by Alvy at the start of the movie.
The real undoing of their relationship was that Alvy did not take his own advice and continued to stay entrenched in his own persona instead of developing with Annie (A scenario Allen also tackles in WHATEVER WORKS). Even his friend Max, a fellow New Yorker at the start of the movie, emigrates out to LA. You don’t feel completely bad for Alvy though, he obviously has a hard time dealing with the break-up, but at the same time he stays true to himself.
Woody Allen does a wonderful job keeping everything as real as possible, ignoring campy dialogue and seemingly just replaying conversations that have actually occurred in his own life. One thing that I welcomed was the willingness to break the 4th wall spontaneously, having Alvy explain something to the audience, just in case they missed the point. Including doing this with flashbacks as well.
ANNIE HALL was a great movie, my second Woody Allen film. A much, much better WHATEVER WORKS. The only thing I worry as I venture into more Allen flicks is if the world as a retarded experiment combined with the lust we have as humans is something he can easily stray from. I am sure we will find out as I continue to watch movies that make you go, “Oh yeah, that movie.”
8/10
Diane Keaton, Neurotic, Oh Yeah, Woody Allen
Reader Comments (3)
....Their relationship doesn't work out?!?! Spoiler Alert, CMON! That's like informing someone about how Junior and his nemesis hook up at the end of "Problem Child 2".
Damn it Ed!!!
Thanks for spoiling "Problem Child 2" ... what's the point of me watching it now?! Aside from John Ritter being awesome ... RIP good sir.
This is nothing like putting some cod in tin foil on the top rack of the oven with a bit of lemon squeezed on for flavor