Weird how time of day and setting can you effect your feeling toward a movie. It's cold today, bitterly cold. I'm alone in the house and most of the lights are off. And today's movie, one I've seen a zillion times, came off as a cold artifact from a distant time, albeit one packed with more zingers and one liners than a basically sad story of a doomed relationship should rightfully have. Yeesh, Dave. Whatever. Ahem. Here then is the third installment of Five Movies I Pulled Off The Shelf With My Eyes Closed. Yesterday we looked at a Best Picture nominee. Here now is a best picture winner.

PHOTO BY MY OWN HAND
PHOTO BY MY OWN HAND
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Levels. Layers. Nuances. Art. Not something you'd normally think of when it comes to a film ladled liberally with sex, pot and death jokes. On one level you got a fractured, hopping back and forth through both detailing of the rise and fall of a relationship, Woody Allen's character trying to pinpoint the part where he screwed the whole thing up. Also, you get visits to Allen's raucous childhood, his home right under the roller coaster at Coney Island, these filling you in on the formation of Allen's various neuroses. Also, characters break the fourth wall and talk to the camera on regular basis. Also there's an animated sequence.

(This translates as "the city of euro theorists" I kid you not)
(This translates as "the city of euro theorists" I kid you not)
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Around all this, you get a picture of a New York City, liberal, intellectual, clean, that solely seems to be the image Allen has in his head, and not actually representative of the actual 1976 New York, which, by all accounts, was a fetid sump hole that even the U.S. Government had written off. (As an example, Taxi Driver was filmed around the same time.) (Wait a minute)

And, yet, maybe because Annie Hall was photographed by Gordon Willis, known as the prince of darkness, the man who shot The Godfather, that the film has a certain shadowed darkness that creeps in, which gives a depth and weight to the film that it would not have if it were shot like most comedies, flat, in the brightest light possible (which the film actually mocks when it spends some time, to Allen's chagrin, In California.)

And of course, there's also Walken.

So if you haven't checked out this movie before, I highly recommend spending some time with it. Perhaps on a sunnier day than I did. This time through it kinda felt looking through someone else's photograph book on a cold, rainy day. Honestly, the first time I saw this movie was at a neighbor's house in the dead of night on New year's Eve 1979. And now that I have watched it through a 48 year old's eyes, it was bound to be different. Man, I just realized I'm older than the main characters in the film.

Ahem. Did you know alternate names considered for the film were:It Had to Be JewRollercoaster Named Desire and Me and My Goy?

If you haven't seen it in a while, give it another look. You'll notice things you've may have missed, like Allen's best friend always calling him by the wrong name, or that Diane Keaton's performance, growing from flibberty-jibbit to something approaching a self actualized grown up, is something of prime weapon. Which is ironic, because the thing leads to this, Allen's pushing her to better herself, is the thing that also tears them apart.

And that's Annie Hall.

Tomorrow, get set for number four, a complete change of pace, for sure.

P.S: If you are just settling into your seat and missed the second installment of this series, you can find that here: Five Movies Part Two!

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