Manhattan

'Manhattan' looks beautiful in black and white. It is definitely Woody Allen's best. Two years after 'Annie Hall' we have Woody Allen and Diane Keaton together again. Allen plays Isaac who is dating the 17-year old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). He has a friend, the married Yale (Michael Murphy), who is having an affair with Mary (Diane Keaton). Isaac falls in love with Mary and stops seeing Tracy to start things with Mary. In a sub-plot we have the ex-wife of Isaac publishing a book about their sex-life. Now she is living with a woman. The ex-wife Jill is played by Meryl Streep. Her appearances are short and not very often but she is more than great in her scenes.

'Manhattan' is even better than the great 'Annie Hall'. The black and white cinematograpy, done with a good reason, gives a little extra to the movie. Like I said Streep is terrific and so are Allen, Keaton and especially Hemingway (she was nominated for an Oscar). The monologues Allen had in 'Annie Hall' are still present, smart, interesting and funny. A great story, very intelligent, of course written (and directed) by Woody Allen himself.

Woody Allen started off making outrageous, cheap, hit-and-miss, unpretentious comedies, the best of which were probably "Love and Death" and "Sleeper." The comedy became more rooted in reality and grafted onto an engaging story of lost love in "Annie Hall," which I think is still his best film. After that, "Interiors." Ka-Boom. Since then there have been no more absurd comedies, several gloomy dramas, and many more or less successful attempts to blend comedy with serious themes.

This is one of the dark comedies and didn't work for me. Allen is going with a high-school girl, falls for a woman nearer his own age, alienates his close friend, and finally decides -- too late -- that the younger girl is his soul mate. It ends ambiguously with her leaving for Europe. The plot is out of a soap opera. It does have some witty lines (almost all of them given to Allen himself) and a lot of inside New Yorker intellectual allusions, but, aside from the Gershwin score, isn't worth seeing twice. Really, it's pretty boring. The performances aren't bad, but Allen doesn't challenge himself either. It's his old neurotic, stuttering, put-upon persona that is by now more than familiar enough. There's just nothing new.

It isn't that Allen had run out of ideas by 1979 because he's made some successful films since then -- "Hollywood Ending" and "Broadway Danny Rose", for instance. But "Manhattan" is one of the many that simply got by me. It didn't seem charming. It seemed repetitious and pointless. I didn't bother counting the times someone meets another and says, "Hiii," using the contours of the fourth tone in Mandarin Chinese. And no one seems to say it just once during a given encounter, but several times. "Hii, hii -- how AHH you?"

I kept waiting for one of two things to happen. Either IT takes off or I get drawn in. But neither contingency was realized. I cared about the entanglements in "Annie Hall," but here it didn't matter to me who wound up with whom, and I never got the feeling that it mattered much to Allen either.

From a technical standpoint, this film is top-notch - the acting is brilliant, the cinematography is beautiful, and the George Gershwin soundtrack is excellent.

But the content of the film is another thing. Basically, Woody Allen comes across as an egomaniacal creep who writes parts for himself in order to make him look like he's God's gift to women (there are so many references to his sexual prowess one could start a group drinking game based off it).

And anybody with even a beginner's understanding of adolescent psychological development knows that men who pursue teenage girls are sick and sadistic bastards who find joy in ruining promising young lives.

So my summary is: Like the film for its craft, but loathe the creator for his statement.

I used to hold this film as somewhat of a sacred cow when I first saw it in 1979. I was a proscribed Woody fan and

although I still like a few of his movies, this is no longer one of them, on recent review.

I recently purchased copies of Manhattan and Annie Hall.

I watched the latter first and it charmed my socks off again. One classic scene after another signals the height of Allen's art in this hilarious masterwork. Manhattan is a different story.

Perhaps my recent viewing of Wild Man Blues has hipped

me to what an whining, pampered egomaniac Mr. Allen is.

Perhaps it's the irony of his Chaplin-like dalliances with young women that have set me against him. But I now watch Manhattan

and see a pathetic, overblown Allen literally feeding lines to his

fellow actors to give him some smarmy comeback that never fails to show how intellectually superior he is. Different from Annie Hall, Allen is no longer the underdog but an ugly, obnoxious

over-lord...

His characters in Manhattan, are cardboard. They are not real and

the situations are not real. I have no feeling for anyone in this

movie, except Woody, who I feel contempt for, given his massive

and unfunny self-indulgence. It's pathetic to see Allen set up

Hemingway with lines that a teenager would never say in a million

years, just to trump up his flaccid ego. Everyone in this movie actually feeds him lines to trump up his ego.

Like Stardust Memories, this one shows Woody at his self- indulgent worst. This movie looks wonderful and sounds wonderful with the Gershwin score, but on further review, this

one's hollow and ultimately a maddening tribute to an egomaniac.

Let me get this out of the way: I'm a big Woody Allen fan. And this flick is absolutely and utterly his. From the black and white to the ambience and, of course, the dialog, it all screams Woody Allen as loud as it can. As most of his movies, Woody is not simply playing a character, nor simply being himself. It is a mix, a blend between a real man and a made up persona. And, as always, the line is weirdly blurry, making it so, at times, you're watching a documentary. The plot itself is not the central point of the story and, at times, it is hard to understand exactly what it is leading to. No, the focus of the story is the characters. Characters like Isaac, Yale and the city. Specially the city. It is an homage to a now distant past of history, viewed from the lens of a troubled mix of a real and fictional man. It is hard to defend most of Isaac's actions. And it is way harder to get mad at them. It is a movie about imperfection, ego, society, intellectuals and love. And it is great. A great movie to be rewatched as many times as you can.