Annie Hall
Alvy is smarter than the ground rules of Hollywood currently allow. Watching even the more creative recent movies, one becomes aware of a subtle censorship being imposed, in which the characters cannot talk about anything the audience might not be familiar with. This generates characters driven by plot and emotion rather than by ideas; they use catch-phrases rather than witticisms. Consider the famous sequence where Annie and Alvy are standing in line for the movies and the blowhard behind them pontificates loudly about Fellini. When the pest switches over to McLuhan, Alvy loses patience, confronts him, and then triumphantly produces Marshall McLuhan himself from behind a movie poster to inform him, "You know nothing of my work!" This scene would be penciled out today on the presumption that no one in the audience would have heard of Fellini or McLuhan.
Annie Hall
Another one of my favorite scenes is when Woody stops a good-looking, straight-laced couple on a street in Greenwich Village and asks them how they account for being happy. She answers: "I'm very shallow and empty and we have no ideas and nothing interesting to say." Then her boyfriend chimes in: "And I'm exactly the same way." Woody responds: "I see. So you've managed to work out something.".
Woody Allen's long career has had different stages. Around the time Annie Hall was made, Allen was transitioning from broad, slapstick-heavy spoofs such as Sleeper and Bananas toward more personal, introspective comedies and dramas. Annie Hall may not have giant chickens or silly robot costumes, but it retains a plethora of one-liners and hilarious, attention-getting narrative devices, such as flashbacks that allow the adult Woody to sit in on his elementary-school days and argue Freud with the exasperated kids in his old homeroom. As a moralist, Allen -- too obviously -- has few solutions. But he asks many pointed questions. In one of a series of person-on-the-street interviews Alvy asks a couple who are content with each other what their secret is. They declare that they're shallow and stupid.
As it happens, Allen didn't attend the ceremony, preferring to keep his regular jazz gig in Manhattan than visit LA: a town where, as Alvy says in Annie Hall, "the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light". No matter, Allen won two Oscars, for direction and for the screenplay, co-written with Marshall Brickman.
But most of Annie Hall is fiction. Allen's first working title for the film, according to John Baxter's biography of Woody Allen, was entitled "Anhedonia," a clinical term describing the inability to enjoy life.10 This version was based on aspects of Woody Allen's own life (and unused parts of it reappear in both Stardust Memories and Deconstructing Harry), but he dropped much of the personal material in order to focus the film around Alvy's relationship with Annie, most of which is indeed fictional, made up by Woody Allen and his cowriter on the script, Marshall Brick-man. Alvy Singer's wives, as they appear in flashbacks in Annie Hall, bear little resemblance to Woody Allen's actual past wives, Harlene Rosen and Louise Lasser, and the character Annie Hall, despite the life and vitality given to her by Diane Keaton, has only a superficial resemblance to Diane Keaton the person. Nevertheless, when Woody Allen complained in interviews that people got it into their heads that Annie Hall was autobiographical and he couldn't convince them that it was not, he is being disingenuous. In Annie Hall Allen deliberately sets up the illusion that the film is a personal recounting of his life, feeding the hungry voyeurism of the film audience, while mostly presenting them with fiction.
While Alvy's happy ending for his play is facile and implausible, Allen's Annie Hall ends, if not happily, at least artfully. As Alvy begins to relate how after their breakup he and Annie did meet again, the voice of Annie singing "Seems Like Old Times" is softly heard on the sound track. Alvy relates that Annie has moved back to New York and has taken her new boyfriend to see The Sorrow and the Pity, the film that Alvy was always dragging her to see because of the importance and seriousness of its message. He calls this "a personal triumph," presumably because it suggests that Alvy is still alive in her mind: she has internalized his values. She has also left the shallow viciousness of Los Angeles to return to New York, another indication that Alvy's values have affected her life choices.
Annie Hall is a 1977 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Woody Allen, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Marshall Brickman. The cast includes Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Janet Margolin, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken, and Colleen Dewhurst.
Annie y Alvy, en una fila para ver "The Sorrow and the Pity", escuchan a otro hombre ridiculizando el trabajo de Federico Fellini y Marshall McLuhan; Alvy se imagina al propio McLuhan interviniendo ante su invitación para criticar la comprensión del hombre. Esa noche, Annie no muestra ningún interés en tener sexo con Alvy. En cambio, hablan de su primera esposa. Su segundo matrimonio fue con una escritora neoyorquina a la que no le gustaban los deportes y no podÃa alcanzar el orgasmo. 041b061a72
