Movie Reviews
Stardust Memories
Sandy Bates is a successful movie director who, against his better judgement, goes to a retrospective of his films in a slightly seedy seaside resort. He used to make funny films, but now he is making more serious ones, and the studio wants to re-cut his most recent bleak endeavor and add a new, happy, ending. We see scenes of odd people on a train, and wandering around a garbage dump. Not ... Read more »
Manhattan
I think I love Manhattan as much as Woody Allen does. Maybe more, because I’ve never lived there, never had a chance to grow even a little bit accustomed to it. Every trip to Manhattan (the Bronx, and Staten Island, too!) is a magical moment for me. So when this love poem to Manhattan began unreeling on the screen for the first time in glorious black and white to the sounds of one of my ... Read more »
Interiors
Some movies, they should hand out a suicide kit in the lobby, in case you just can’t make it to the end. A length of rope, a razor blade, a revolver with one bullet. For the Buddhists, a can of gasoline. Films about the Holocaust, for instance, or one of Woody Allen’s favorites, The Sorrow and the Pity. Some of the films of Ingmar Bergman, who Woody has always ... Read more »
Annie Hall
(OLD REVIEW) This is the turning point for Woody Allen. Before, he wrote and directed some of the funniest movies ever made: Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death. After, he was likely to do any sort of movie. I’m a big, big fan of the funny stuff (in Read more »
Love and Death
Here we have the last of Woody Allen’s “funny” movies, the sixth movie he directed. Not that he didn’t have tons of humor in his later efforts, it’s just that with his next one, Annie Hall, he started moving off in a whole new direction. Before that, it was jokes, cerebral one-liners, slapstick, insanity. He was in competition with Mel Brooks, not the writers and ... Read more »
Sleeper
I find I’m much more likely to enjoy a funny science fiction movie than a “serious” one. The serious ones too often get solemn and usually go off the rails at some point. It’s so much more fun to see something that takes the tropes of real SF and plays with them, movies like Idiocracy, or Paul, or Galaxy ... Read more »
Play It Again, Sam
Yes, Woody knew, and I know, and every movie buff in the world knows that Bogey never said that. He said “You played it for her, you can play it for me! If she can stand it, I can! Play it!” Just as every movie buff in the world knows that Charles Foster Kane was alone in the room when he muttered “Rosebud.” (Or was he? We never saw the whole room. The nurse came running through the door ... Read more »
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask
This was one of those inexplicable best-sellers, a book that for some reason, everybody had to have. I haven’t read it. There’s nothing I was afraid to ask, and not much I didn’t know. Seems Woody got pissed when he saw the author, David Ruben, when someone asked him if sex was dirty. He replied “It is if you’re doing it right.” That’s a line he stole from Take the ... Read more »
Bananas
Woody is showing a lot more control of his material here. There are no real slow spots, it just keeps barreling on, one insane situation to the next. From the opening credits, a catchy tune in Spanish accompanied by automatic gunfire, we’re off to the races. Woody is his usual schlemiel, but I hadn’t gotten tired of that role yet. He gets involved in a revolution in a Central American ... Read more »
Take the Money and Run
So this is the first movie Woody directed that had actual actors and an actual script, and used real cameras to shoot the action. Learned a little about it, as usual, from the IMDb. His first cut was a disaster, no one laughed. The studio hired an editor who transformed it, which just shows to go you that editing is one of the underrated skills in the movies. Originally, Virgil ... Read more »