Ace Posted August 5, 2014 Posted August 5, 2014 I watched Manhattan and Annie Hall this weekend and was wondering what others who have seen them think. Mild spoiler alert. I like his humour, thought both were pretty funny. I've never seen a Woody Allen movie before, his whole style/sense of humour reminds me very much of Larry David/George Costanza, I have to believe it was a major influence. It is like a lot of movies in that the effort is made to be really deep but it's all pretty shallow and ultimately unresolved matters they address. In both movies there's a fair bit of talk about seeing psychoanalysts, and I read that Woody Allen has been doing it for much of his life. But in the films that is treated more as kind of a novelty or indulgence of the characters. I think FDR has ruined my ability to just mindlessly enjoy movies lol, I pick out all the contradictions now. Ie. his character is an intellectual, not religious etc. but in Manhattan after he quits his job he says he's worried now he won't be able to send his father money so he can get the best seat in the Synagogue. In both movies the characters have largely rejected the values of their parents consciously, and speak mockingly of them, but they still go along with them. I guess that's going half way at least. Most people never even go as far as acknowledging that their parents are full of shit, let alone addressing it with them. And with these accusations that Woody Allen may have sexually abused his adopted daughter back in the day I'm sure there's all kinds of deeper analysis that could be done about him making a movie where he's dating a 17 year old girl! For most of the film he doesn't believe it's serious or of any real value and tries really hard to convince her that it isn't. And then at end he contradicts everything he said before. So the moral is probably the he's just a manipulator with no integrity. It's always entertaining though how stories about New York so often follow the same formula - intellectual (or at least pseudo-intellectual) people who are constantly moving from relationship to relationship and the trials and tribulations of that. Maybe that's the truth though? I remember Gavin McInnes on RedEye he said, which I thought was funny, "New York is an elephant's graveyard for ovaries. The men are perpetual teenagers incapable of monogamy." All in all though I enjoyed both. And Diane Keaton was really cute back in the day.
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