annie hall

Annie Hall (1977) was the funniest movie i watched in a long while. i simply loved it and would recommend it to anyone. i liked it especially for the manner in which it was directed and for its script; and i liked the way Woody Allen dealt with the role. Now i can hardly wait to watch his 2005 production, Match Point.

Self-entitled "a nervous romance", the movie gives great insights of contemporary love and urban relationships, as bitter-sweet as they are, being centered around the relationship between "neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer and the ditsy Annie Hall". Plus, the way Woody Allen acted made me think a lot about planners, and the natural way that they should express and talk and question and use each circumstance. i'm not sure this makes sense, but these were the connections my tourmented brain made.

As a trivia, i read on filmsite.org that "a real-life relationship and breakup did occur in early 1970 between Allen and co-star Keaton. Keaton's birth name was Diane Hall, her nickname was Annie, and she did have a Grammy Hall. And Woody Allen played a similar role as mentor to Diane Keaton (about New York life, politics, philosophy, and books), as did best friend Tony Roberts to Allen."

Some quotes:

• "Two elderly women are at a Catskill Mountain resort. And one of 'em says: 'Boy, the food in this place is really terrible.' The other one says: 'Yeah, I know. And such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly."
• "The other important joke for me is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx but I think it appears originally in Freud's Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious - and it goes like this. I'm paraphrasing. I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member. That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women."
• "The universe is expanding...Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, some day it will break apart and that will be the end of everything."
• A normal-looking kid: "I used to be a heroin addict. Now I'm a methadone addict."
• "I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light."
• "'Why do you always reduce my animal urges to psychoanalytic categories?' he said as he removed her brassiere."
• "I'm obsessed with uh, with death, I think. Big - big subject with me, yeah. I have a very pessimistic view of life. You should know this about me if we're gonna go out. You know, I - I feel that life is - is divided up into the horrible and the miserable. Those are the two categories, you know. The - the horrible would be like, um, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. You know, and the miserable is everyone else. That's - that's - so - so - when you go through life - you should be thankful that you're miserable because you're very lucky to be miserable."

.....hmmm...but come to think about it, there are so many lines i would quote, that one could actually take the whole script and read it as a very funny book. or, much better, watch the movie.