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Interiors

After the tremendous success of ANNIE HALL, Woody Allen took a huge risk and turned serious with INTERIORS, his Bergmanesque masterpiece--a dark, intense look at a family suffocating itself in thoughts of failure and death. Geraldine Page is extraordinary as Eve, a troubled woman who cannot face reality. When Eve's husband, Arthur (E.G. Marshall), announces that he's moving out of the house, their three daughters (Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, and Kristin Griffith) gather around the mother, attempting to help her through this crisis, but they have been raised with such coldness and aloofness that they are helpless. The first movie that Allen wrote and directed but did not appear in, INTERIORS is about closed spaces, both physical and psychological. Most of the scenes feature the intense cast standing by windows, looking out at the world that is going on outside without them. The opening shot of Renata (Keaton) reaching out to the window, spreading her fingers, is mesmerizing. Gordon Willis's photography washes the film in shades of black, white, and gray--the only color comes from Pearl (Maureen Stapleton), Arthur's new lover, who is vibrant and impulsive, everything Eve's family is not. The film also has no background music whatsoever; in fact, aside from one scene in which Pearl plays a jazz record, the only background sounds that can be heard are the quiet call of the ocean and the sisters' careful breathing. Slow-paced, bleak, and marvelously insightful, INTERIORS is a poignant film that should not be missed.

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Sleeper

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Sleeper

The sci-fi satire SLEEPER is often hailed as the best of Woody Allen's early comedies, which relied mostly on slapstick and quick verbal asides, but still had more than their share of comic intelligence. SLEEPER tells the tale of Miles Monroe (Allen), who is accidentally cryogenically frozen following a minor operation. Released 200 years later, in 2173, Miles blunders his way through a bizarre future, featuring plenty of props and situations for Allen to mine for laughs. Eventually he meets vapid, hedonistic "poet" Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton), with whom he eventually joins a rebel group opposed to the oppressive government. As in his earlier BANANAS and LOVE AND DEATH, Allen's character stumbles into a revolutionary plot, revealing the anti-authoritarianism that will appear again and again in his films. Loosely based on H.G. Wells' novel WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES, the film features a strong parodic bent, particularly of the type of science fiction that was being written and filmed when it was made in 1973. Oppressive, faceless governments and the technological dominance over human life (altering even the most fundamental natural actions, such as sex) are the main tropes Allen skewers, as well as playing off the futuristic production design of films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and THX-1138. However, SLEEPER was still considered a strong work of science fiction, winning both the prestigious Hugo and Nebula Awards, which are given to the finest works in the genre.

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Radio Days [DVD]

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Radio Days [DVD]

RADIO DAYS is Woody Allen's charming, nostalgic, very funny love letter to growing up in 1940s Brooklyn during the golden age of radio. The setting is the close-knit working-class neighborhood of Rockaway, New York, where a warm, crazy, sprawling Jewish family lives, sharing their happiness as well as their disappointments. The youngest member of the family, Joe (Seth Green, of television's BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER), dreams of the glamour and excitement of Manhattan conjured up by the radio programs he and his family listen raptly to each night. Presented in a tapestry of interlocking vignettes, RADIO DAYS weaves tales of everyday family life with glimpses of the glittering--and not so glittering--world of established and aspiring radio celebrities. Allen makes the radio the film's central figure, taking its place as communicator to the world, existing almost as another member of the family. Allen and director of photography Carlo DiPalma capture the look and feel of the time marvelously, and the music is a joy to listen to. The result is a comic, bittersweet, kaleidoscopic look at a long-gone New York that is one of writer-director Woody Allen's most fully realized--and most enjoyable--films.

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Annie Hall (Contemporary Classics) [VHS]

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Annie Hall (Contemporary Classics) [VHS]

Often considered the crown jewel in a highly acclaimed and prolific film career, ANNIE HALL is Woody Allen's only film to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. This recognition, however, is not what makes the film significant. ANNIE HALL marks the beginning of the second phase of Allen's career as a filmmaker, abandoning the slapstick of SLEEPER and BANANAS for more thoughtful comedies (and eventually dramas) that explored human relationships and psychology. Allen's capacity as a creative filmmaker had also grown with the film, as he utilized creative subtitles, split screens, and animation, as well as evincing a sophisticated understanding of the potential of editing and camera movement for comic effect--consider the cutaway to Allen's character Alvy Singer, as seen through the eyes of "Grammy Hall" during the dinner sequence, or shortly afterward the slow pan to Alvy in the passenger seat of a car driven by Annie's unhinged brother Duane. The film is a brutally honest assessment of the prospects of a relationship between two very different people. Allen's Alvy is (like the filmmaker himself) an introverted, neurotic intellectual and a complete mismatch for Diane Keaton's vivacious, flaky Annie Hall. Although the romance is undoubtedly the center of the film, it affords Allen the opportunity to contrast his beloved New York culture with that of the Midwest, where Annie comes from, and Los Angeles, which tempts Annie with the possibility of fame and success as a singer. The city of New York itself plays an important part for the first time in an Allen film, with a great deal of location shooting that serves to highlight the city's character and atmosphere. Finally, the many comedic cameos peppered through the film--from Truman Capote to Paul Simon to media theorist Marshall McLuhan--pay tribute to the deserved reputation that Allen had gained for himself.

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Annie Hall (Checkpoint; Sensormatic; Wid...

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Annie Hall (Checkpoint; Sensormatic; Widescreen) [DVD]

Often considered the crown jewel in a highly acclaimed and prolific film career, ANNIE HALL is Woody Allen's only film to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. This recognition, however, is not what makes the film significant. ANNIE HALL marks the beginning of the second phase of Allen's career as a filmmaker, abandoning the slapstick of SLEEPER and BANANAS for more thoughtful comedies (and eventually dramas) that explored human relationships and psychology. Allen's capacity as a creative filmmaker had also grown with the film, as he utilized creative subtitles, split screens, and animation, as well as evincing a sophisticated understanding of the potential of editing and camera movement for comic effect--consider the cutaway to Allen's character Alvy Singer, as seen through the eyes of "Grammy Hall" during the dinner sequence, or shortly afterward the slow pan to Alvy in the passenger seat of a car driven by Annie's unhinged brother Duane. The film is a brutally honest assessment of the prospects of a relationship between two very different people. Allen's Alvy is (like the filmmaker himself) an introverted, neurotic intellectual and a complete mismatch for Diane Keaton's vivacious, flaky Annie Hall. Although the romance is undoubtedly the center of the film, it affords Allen the opportunity to contrast his beloved New York culture with that of the Midwest, where Annie comes from, and Los Angeles, which tempts Annie with the possibility of fame and success as a singer. The city of New York itself plays an important part for the first time in an Allen film, with a great deal of location shooting that serves to highlight the city's character and atmosphere. Finally, the many comedic cameos peppered through the film--from Truman Capote to Paul Simon to media theorist Marshall McLuhan--pay tribute to the deserved reputation that Allen had gained for himself.

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Manhattan (Checkpoint; Sensormatic; Wide...

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Manhattan (Checkpoint; Sensormatic; Widescreen) [DVD]

Woody Allen finished his first decade of filmmaking, the 1970s, with one of his greatest and most deliberately artistic films, the love song to his home city MANHATTAN. Allen plays Isaac Davis, another one of his thinly veiled self-portraits, who finds himself suffering from a mid-life crisis. Unhappy in his career as a variety show comedy writer and newly divorced from a woman who has since come out as a lesbian, Isaac waffles between two relationships: that with emotionally honest and open, but far too young, Tracy (Mariel Hemingway in an Academy Award nominated performance) and with pseudo-intellectual, neurotic Mary (Diane Keaton). Allen uses these two women to contrast the naiveté and lack of pretension of youth with the growing cynicism of middle age. Although the acting and writing is some of the sharpest of Allen's filmmaking career, what is truly memorable and endearing about MANHATTAN is its romantic view of New York. Whereas the character relationships in the film are largely dysfunctional and fueled by a vision of perfection, by contrast the city itself is envisioned by Allen as an object of perfection. In order to create aesthetically pleasing images of the city, Allen and his longtime cinematographer Gordon Willis decided to shoot the film in black and white and in the 2.35:1 widescreen ratio, the first time that Allen had used either format. The images are backed by the songs of quintessential New York composer George Gershwin, setting a tone of romanticism and grandeur that underlies Isaac's (and Allen's) inherent dissatisfaction with the mundane aspects of his life. The magnificence of the city of New York is the backdrop to the search for a similar splendor in human relationships in MANHATTAN.

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