Word: allen
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There's a wonderful scene in "Annie Hall" when Woody Allen's character, Alvy, is standing in line with Annie (played by Diane Keaton) to see a film. Behind the couple is an obnoxious pseudo-intellectual (who we later find out is a professor at Columbia) mindlessly nattering on and on about every topic imaginable. The professor's knowledge knows no bounds: we are subjected first to criticism of Federico Fellini's oeuvre, then to a savage diatribe against Samuel Beckett. Names are dropped with impunity, including that of media theorist Marshall McLuhan...
...movie buff friends tell me that the above scene is the first instance in which Woody Allen presents Annie Hall's main theme: the idea that only in art can one reshape reality and have complete control over one's life. As Alvy says into the camera after the scene, "Boy, if life were only like this...
...find the "any interpretation is valid" argument convincing. There are instances when, as Woody Allen memorably shows us, we simply are wrong. I recognize, of course, that Ellison didn't reject my argument in the way McLuhan rejected the professor's; while "no conscious reference to Garvey" may have been intended, Ellison did considerately leave the realm of his unconscious wide open to academic scrutiny. Unfortunately, I'm no psychoanalyst...
Prosecutors need to be careful when they start tossing around the word love. They make it sound like a subclause in your mortgage. So much the worse, then, when they get to sex and end up like some fidgety imitation of Woody Allen. "Back to the touching of your breasts for a minute," Lewinsky gets asked at one point in her testimony. "Was that then through clothing or actually, directly onto your skin?" The seamy, repetitive questions laid bare the puritanical monomania that infects this mad pursuit: "Would you agree that the insertion of an object into the genitalia...
When Robin Williams enters hell, the movie's visual style lags. Like Ward's heaven, hell is a collection of schoolbook cliches, but without the visual flourish that marked the earlier passages. The hell that Woody Allen presented satirically in Deconstructing Harry is far more frightening than the absurdity in What Dreams May Come. Perhaps no director could reconcile presentations of heaven and hell successfully--David Lynch could certainly do the latter--and in this situation, Ward fails at both tasks...