Woody Allen, Woody Allen, R (MPAA), DVD Planet in DVDs & Videos

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Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci star as a mismatched couple in Woody Allen's funny and well-made romantic comedy ANYTHING ELSE. Biggs plays Jerry Falk, a young comedy writer looking to make it big, while Ricci is Amanda, a self-absorbed free spirit whom men go wild for. They fall for each other instantly near the beginning of the film, then spend the rest of the movie trying to work out their very complex and complicated relationship, especially after her mother (Stockard Channing) moves in to their small apartment to live with them. With echoes of such classic Allen fare as ANNIE HALL, ANYTHING ELSE is a lighthearted look at young love in the Big Apple. Allen himself stars as David Dobel, an older comedy writer who mentors Jerry, often on walks through Central Park, but it seems that Dobel has a bit of an anger management problem. Once again, New York City is virtually a character unto itself, as Allen includes scenes in such Gotham places as the Village Vanguard jazz club, Isabella's restaurant, Roosevelt Island, Sheepshead Bay, and the Quad Cinema. Good supporting work is turned in by Danny DeVito as Falk's manager. The soundtrack includes songs by Billie Holiday, Ravi Shankar, Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Moby, and Diana Krall, who appears in the film.

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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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Gabe and Judy Roth (Woody Allen and Mia Farrow), a long-married couple, find their relationship starting to crumble when their best friends, Jack and Sally (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis), announce that they are separating. Allen's use of a hand-held camera and jump-cuts adds immediacy to a brilliant display of ensemble acting. Pollack delivers an Oscar-worthy performance.

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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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Ostensibly based on the famous non-fiction bestseller by David Reuben, EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX, BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK is a series of comedic sketches from writer-director-actor Woody Allen. All seven segments of the film are posed as questions taken directly from Reuben's book, but act mostly as satirical springboards for Allen's comic genius. They take many forms, from a scenario on medieval adultery to a mad scientist-monster movie parody to a send-up of Italian sex films. Like many of Allen's early films, the humor in EVERYTHING...combines both quick-witted verbal quips (bearing the influence of Groucho Marx) and outright physical slapstick, but also shows Allen evolving as a filmmaker after his previous two films, BANANAS and TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. Although it seems the logical extension of the scattered plotting of those earlier films, the segmentation of the film allowed Allen to experiment as a filmmaker: the clean and clinical appearance of the famous final sequence would be found again in his sci-fi satire SLEEPER, and the Italian parody (among other sketches) finds Allen imitating the aesthetic features of European masters (such as Antonioni) for the first time, something he would later do again and again. EVERYTHING...is also perhaps Allen's most thoroughly outrageous and subversive comedy, touching on a number of sensitive issues and mining laughs from touchy subject matter.

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MIGHTY APHRODITE is Woody Allen's stab at Greek comedy/tragedy, and it is wildly successful. Allen stars as Lenny Weinrib, a sportswriter married to ambitious Amanda Sloan (Helena Bonham Carter), who desperately wants her own art gallery in New York City and is willing to play the game to get it. Amanda convinces a reluctant Lenny to adopt, and they end up with beautiful Max. Lenny soon becomes obsessed with finding out who Max's biological parents are, and he is not exactly happy when he discovers that the mother is a high-pitched actress wanna-be who is also a minor porn star and hooker (Mira Sorvino, in an Oscar-winning performance). Lenny is determined to turn her life around--but at the same time is forced to examine his own marriage, which is failing. Allen intersperses New York City vignettes with hysterical scenes of a Greek chorus, led by F. Murray Abraham, chiming in about Lenny's life, comparing it to Greek drama, and breaking out into song-and-dance numbers. The scenes in which the two worlds meet--both in New York and in the Greek theater, are wonderfully witty and incisive. This charming light comedy from Woody Allen also features fine cameo appearances by Olympia Dukakis, David Ogden Stiers, Jack Warden, and Tony Sirico.

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