Instant Favorite.

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Tom (Billy Jack) Laughlin dropped his membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts ans Sciences after "Annie Hall" won Best Picture. He believed that "Star Wars" should have won. He understood that George Lucas' film would forever change the way movies were made and that it should have been recognized for that. It's hard to argue with that. Especially now since "Annie Hall" is almost completely forgotten. "AH" is rarely mentioned when Woody Allen fans discuss his movies. It wasn't that good then and now it seems completely dated. Many of Woody's films get better every time I see them ("Stardust Memories" ,"Zelig","Scoop""Broadway Danny Rose"). "AH" just lays there. It seems an hour longer than it is. There are some laugh out loud moments but it hardly seems worth the effort. Then again, it's way better than "Alice".

Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" works despite some flaws mostly in Allen's direction. This is likely due to the fact that Allen wasn't entirely sure what the film was going to be about but the film editor Ralph Rosenblum was instrumental in putting all the pieces together. It doesn't matter how it was put together: the final product is terrific. I wish I could watch it fresh all over again. It's comedic scenes are unpredictable, Allen's one liners are often priceless. It is partly an autobiography (of sorts) about Allen that morphs into focusing on his relationship to Diane Keaton as Annie Hall. Keaton is tremendous here. She possesses everything a star actor needs: she's charming, pretty and smart. She captures the audiences affections early on and that is key to the film's success. "Annie Hall" is the only one of Allen's films that really feels human. The ending is truly touching, an achievement that Allen rarely was able to achieve (though he often tried very hard to).

Annie Hall's directed by Woody Allen, costume design by Ruth Morley, screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, and stars Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Annie Hall's purpose is to show us what happened between Alvy and Annie and why their relationship did not work out, it takes us through all the steps and takes us to his early childhood all the way to when he was dating Annie. Annie Hall follows the life of Alvy Singer, a prolific comedian who (is basically Woody Allen) becomes famous and behind closed doors, is extremely paranoid and worries about everything, he would come off as having neurotic behavior and seems to be suspicious about people. Every since he was a child he has questioned everything and was very intellectual, he has always been more 'advanced' than his colleagues at school, he has always been superior to everyone around him and always knew more, now that he is an adult, he is the underdog of modern society when it comes to being an individual rather than a so-called 'celebrity' and cannot seem to go anywhere without being noticed. I think he starts off telling us about his childhood so we can get a glimpse at why he is the way he is, we can also now understand his tendencies a lot more as now they do not just come out of the blue. And then we meet Annie Hall herself, she has a headache and is in a bad mood and does not have the patience nor energy to listen to Alvy complain again and again. He seems very apathetic towards Annie and doesn't even question her headache, he just thinks she is on her period, that is what he always thinks whenever Annie is in a bad mood, he does not care enough to even ask. Their plan was to go to the movies but it stared 2 MINUTES AGO, Alvy gets too self conscious and decides not to go in, he over exaggerates the situation and so they go spend their time trying to watch a different film. Alvy comes off as being hostile and quite selfish in a sense, always wanting or needing and never really topping to think. They go wait in line for movie tickets and while they are in line a man keeps talking into Alvy's ear, he can't help but listen and he starts to get irritated. He makes commentary while the man keeps talking about directors he likes and dislikes and why, then Alvy and Annie discuss their inactive sexual life quite loudly and then the man goes back to talking again. The break the man took just for them to talk about their sexual life was quite funny but what comes after that is even funnier. The fact that he is not even aware that Alvy and Annie are talking about him is funny and the comedic commentary is also a good touch. Then he breaks the fourth wall and they have an argument right at the camera about Marshall McLuhan, a known professor of media theory and this is the best part. It is a battle between intellectuals if their field and it is done so well. The entire film has that sort of motion of fast paced comedic commentary, quick jokes, quirky fashion, good directing, surrealism, dark humour I mean it has the entire woody Allen experience. I actually really like this movie, one of my favorites, I wish Woody Allen still had the opportunity to make films like this, he still has the talent but opportunity is short, not many people can do this type of comedy and make it work on screen and if they manage to do so it will probably look forced or be very unfunny and not feel authentic or natural enough to be good.Then we get a moment where they once again, discuss their sex life, they bring that conversation full circle and Alvy complains about how they have not had sex in months and he used to be sexy and they used to have sex constantly. This scene shows how sexually lackluster their relationship is and how distant they have grown. You can already start to pin point where the relationship starts to slip through the cracks a little bit. The film goes on like that for a while and that is how we see these characters, mostly through Alvy's perspective which is always exaggerated but they do have their moments of affection. New York is important in this film, it's politics and it's culture are all pivotal to understanding this film, you have to be able to think about what is being said and apply it to what Alvy is going through in the story. You can see the deep down issues with Alvy as well as the women he dates, he dates women who are completely opposite to himself, Annie is ditsy and a hopeless romantic happy go lucky woman and Alvy just likes to be paranoid about everything, make heat of the moment jokes and try to have sex with his ladies.Annie Hall has it's beautiful, soft moments where it is just Annie and Alvy together having a good time, while it has moments of self analysis, sexual discovery, political commentary and critiques of the human condition and society's uneducated intellectuals and relationships in general.

I enjoyed this as much if not more than any Woody Allen movie I've seen and I've seen most of them. The early titles, what we may call the First Wave were rightly viewed as a series of sketches with little or no unifying theme, reminding us of nothing so much as Oscar Wilde's lifelong desire to write a play with no plot just a string of epigrams. Then came the phase of more linear story lines which lost the one-liners followed by the current phase in which he no longer appears himself but employs actors to play 'Woody Allen' type characters. With Annie Hall the one-liners come thick and fast and 90 per cent of them are thrown away and punctuated by two sequences in which Diane Keaton sings in her own voice; the first time it's the old Gus Kahn standard It Had To Be You, which is interrupted by philistine customers in the club concerned and the second time it a sadly neglected number from 1945, Seems Like Old Times, which does, of course, double as a comment on the relationship of the two principals. In one sense The Way We Were explores very similar territory and would make an excellent double bill. Entertaining, Enjoyable, Bittersweet.