MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

Annie Hall

(Der Stadtneurotiker [de])

USA 1977
d: Woody Allen
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)

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Manhattan

(Manhattan [de])

USA 1979
d: Woody Allen
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)

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A milestone in Woody Allen's career as he dropped (temporarily, at least) the slavish imitation which undermined Interiors and found a tone of his own. The note of tragi-comedy is nicely judged as his hero, a TV comedy writer nervously contemplating a switch to serious literature, equally nervously frets over the women in his life and a pending betrayal of his best friend. An edgy social comedy framed as a loving tribute to neurotic New York, overlaid with an evocative Gershwin score, it's funny and sad in exactly the right proportions. Allen could well strive vainly ever to better this film.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Woody Allen's heart and Gordon Willis' camera conjure up a Platonic Ideal of Manhattan in Manhattan, a visual love poem to the city set to George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." But in the shadow-world below, Allen's mortals have never been so utterly revealed as mice scurrying around an interior maze, struggling to be good and still lead the good life, and haunted by the pristine images the cityscape (and the cinema) offer up. For all its humor and humanity, Manhattan is a bitter chaser to the sweet and winning Annie Hall. Woody Allen's loving neb- bish has become the consummate middle-aged manipulator, upping the ante on the shiksa obsession by finding, then rejecting a doe-eyed beauty (Mariel Hemingway) twenty-five years his junior. The colt-like edginess of Diane Keaton's Annie Hall has hardened into the brittleness of her throughly modern Mary Wilke. ("Keaton," wrote columnist Herb Caen, "...gives the word 'neurotic' a bad name.") Much has been written about Allen and Willis' contribution to the "city symphony" films, but critic Myron Meisel observes their less obvious use of widescreen: "The [final] confrontation [between Allen and Hemingway] inevitably recalls the climax of Chaplin's City Lights, even unto the camera setups and crosscutting. But where Charlie faced the blind girl he loved as she sees him for the first time (and he is recognized as only a tramp), here Allen seems to be seeing himself for the first time.... Chaplin plays most of the scene with the camera behind him, conjuring up an amazingly complex range of emotion with the back of his neck, while Allen, who can only offer the truth, stares embarrassed before the gaze of his anamorphic lens, lost in the wide wash of the frame."
— PFA

Zelig

(Zelig [de])

USA 1983
d: Woody Allen
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)

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Hannah and Her Sisters

(Hannah und ihre Schwestern [de])

USA 1986
d: Woody Allen
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)

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Crimes and Misdemeanors

(Verbrechen und andere Kleinigkeiten [de])

USA 1989
d: Woody Allen
MGM Home Entertainment (Region 2 de)

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In the first of two loosely interwoven stories, rich, philanthropic ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (Landau), afraid his lover (Huston) will reveal all to his wife (Bloom), decides to dispose of the former with the help of a hit-man friend of his brother. In the second, more comic story, earnest, impoverished documentarist Clifford Stern (Allen), falls for the producer (Farrow) of a TV tribute he has reluctantly agreed to make about the brother-in-law he hates (Alda), a conceited, successful maker of sitcoms. Judah and Clifford meet only in the final scene: what links them throughout is guilt, stemming from an obsessive interest in matters of faith and ethics. It's an extremely ambitious film, most akin perhaps to "Hannah and her Sisters", the narrative and tonal coherence of which it sadly lacks, though the assured direction and typically fine ensemble acting manage partly to conceal the seams. Dramatically, the film seldom fulfils its promise, and its pessimistic 'moral' - that good and evil do not always meet with their just deserts - looks contrived and hollow. Intriguing and patchily effective, nevertheless.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
The first "serious" Woody Allen film with Jewish characters (1989) might seem like an improvement after the pseudoprofundities of Interiors et al, but it can't be said to dig any deeper. Martin Landau plays a wealthy ophthalmologist who plots the murder of his mistress (Anjelica Huston) when she threatens to expose his adultery and embezzlement. In quasi-comic counterpoint is the plight of an unsuccessful documentary filmmaker (Allen) who's stuck in an unhappy marriage, goes to work for his obnoxious brother-in-law (Alan Alda), a successful producer of TV sitcoms, and falls in love with one of his assistants (Mia Farrow). The overall "philosophical" thrust--that good guys finish last and that crime does pay--is designed to make the audience feel very wise, but none of the characters or ideas is allowed to develop beyond its cardboard profile (though Alda has a ball with his part).
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Match Point

(Match Point [de])

UK / USA / Luxembourg 2005
d: Woody Allen
Paramount Home Entertainment (Region 0 de)

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There was a time when Woody Allen’s dismissals of his own work as ‘mediocre’ and ‘miserable’ translated as false but endearing modesty. These days, they sound increasingly like confessions. ‘Match Point’ rides into town on the back of wildly varied notices since it first screened in Cannes last May (the Brits go ‘boo!’ the Yanks say ‘yeah!’) and is the director’s much-reported ‘London movie’. With Allen’s career seemingly stuck in middle gear for at least the past decade, this new work certainly benefits from the fresh breeze of a transatlantic trip (initially a financial necessity rather than an artistic departure) – but ‘Matchpoint’ is probably best enjoyed with memories of better Woody Allen films pushed to the back of your mind.
‘Match Point’ is a so-so, sub-Ripley tale of ambition and deception that is set amid the semi-urbane, semi-cultured and very, very boring modern English upper classes. It takes its name from a rather laboured tennis metaphor that allows Allen to riff with little revelation on the amoral, unpredictable nature of luck, as illustrated by a slow-mo opening shot of a tennis ball balancing on the net, ready to fall either side. Allen’s ambiguous anti-hero is Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an Irish tennis coach in London who adopted the game as a ‘way out of a poor existence’. His job introduces him to a wealthy, young Chelsea set whose men follow daddy into the City and whose women flirt with running art galleries as a diverting hobby before motherhood.
It’s this world into which Wilton marries: a parallel universe of people with ‘epic’ CD collections, food (baked potato with truffles, anyone?) that’s ‘yum-yum’ and mothers who exert worrying control over their sons’ choice of girlfriends. Greed, both material and sexual, gets the better of Wilton; he reaps the financial benefits of a marriage to rich-but-nice Chloe (Emily Mortimer) but also strikes up an affair with his wife’s brother’s ex-fiancée, Nora (Scarlett Johansson), who is a feisty American actress who can’t get any work (unlike Johansson, who will continue to get plenty if she continues to deliver such seductive performances as this). Wilton can’t get enough of the good life; he wins a lucrative job in the City courtesy of his father-in-law and precariously juggles a comfortable, if dull, domestic arrangement with passionate sessions at Nora’s small flat (complete with baby oil).
Trapped in a loveless marriage, Wilton is torn between two vices, one of the flesh, one of the wallet. Nora wants him to leave his wife; but the perks of his new lifestyle (big riverside flat, weekends at country homes) just keep on coming. Desperate situations call for desperate measures…
Surprisingly, considering Allen’s outsider status on this project, it’s not London or even the language and habits of the Brits that he gets wrong (although when he does slip up, he cascades). His cast of refined toffs are recognisable, if never likeable, and their dialogue is passable, if never palatable. And realism is not the order of the day anyway; instead Allen plays this operatic meditation on fate as high theatre, allowing for a large measure of coincidental plotting (cue lots of bumping into each other in the street). But it’s not enough to rescue an ending that is lazy, ludicrous and, disastrously, leans on the weakest of twists, as revealed in an ill-conceived epilogue featuring Ewen Bremner and James Nesbitt as police detectives.
The main problem is that, in dramatic terms, it’s all rather inert. Rhys Meyers fails to dig deep into the ambiguity and complexity of his character. Is Wilton simply evil? Or should we feel that the unreasonable demands of the clawing world in which he lives partly justify and drive his actions? It’s difficult to care. Rhys Meyers pouts his way through the film, ably assisted by a nice line in V-neck cashmere jumpers, never offering us a character interesting enough to consider. His behaviour might become increasingly extreme and rash, yet we feel he’s backed himself into a tight corner rather than constructed an entirely false existence that can only be resolved with violence. There’s a pleasing sense of social claustrophobia – but it’s not enough to make Allen’s film work.
— DC, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
In almost all respects, Match Point is an improvement over Crimes and Misdemeanors. It's better crafted and more absorbing, and it doesn't have the distractions of Allen's wisecracks and extended banal philosophizing. The storytelling is much more streamlined, and the pace never flags, though the movie runs 20 minutes longer. It may be the first film in Allen's career to carry an erotic charge, though it's also less personally expressive than most of the others, and its characters are more generic. I also applaud his unfashionable decision to keep gore offscreen, though we do see Chris pulling the trigger both times.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum
•••••
Given the career entropy, his survival has been remarkable, as is the forgiving shower of accolades shepherding his new film, Match Point, home from Cannes. A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon, the movie sports a British veneer, and this relative oddness has been cause for "return to form!" sighs of relief. But Allen is, alas, pushing forward and downward into de-fertilized soil badly in need of crop rotation.
— Michael Atkinson
•••••
(...) Woody Allen a mis en place éléments et personnages avec un génie qui tient de l'évidence.
— Positif - Grégory Valens
•••••
Avec ce film sur lequel personne n'aurait parié, Woody allen se réinvente une fois de plus (...) Si pour raconter le sacrifice d'une jeune fille (...) le cinéaste s'appuie sur l'importance de la chance, ce postulat, au lieu de produire l'insignifiance, accentue le caractère unique de l'issue : la balle ne tombe que d'un côté.
— Cahiers du Cinéma - Mia Hansen-Love