ANNIE HALL, a truly nourishing masterpiece by: Uel Ceballos

Watching any of Woody Allen’s films will really get you glued on your seat, all eyes and ears to everything that’s happening on the screen. Surely, you wouldn’t want to miss any of his brilliant lines which are often delivered in various brainy humorous ways.

photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Annie Hall is a 1977 American romantic comedy film that starred Woody Allen himself. He was also the director and co-writer of the film, wherein you can see the Woody Allen’s style of flashback treatment and more of the significant dialogues approach than the action-show-off kind of film story-telling. The entire film is more of conversations, about 70% telling and 30% showing. But with a highly credited director like Woody Allen, the approaches never lack the necessary imagery to form the pictures in the audiences’ view even without literally showing it. You definitely hear it and feel it. You listen to every words, laugh at every humor, sympathize with the characters demises and you will just realize that you’re already hooked on it. Mainly for the reason that Woody Allen never just write the lines, but he write it with full substances. So much substances actually that you will be amazed on how did Woody Allen came to include somewhere in his script about Marshall McLuhan, Rolling Stone, David and Bathsheeba, The Sorrow and the Pity, the Wicked Queen in Snow White and even stereotyping line that compared L.A to Munchkinland!

Annie Hall is a full romantic comedy type with significant quotes that will leave you pondering at the end. Woody Allen who played Alvy Singer here has been trying to figure out why his relationship with Annie Hall has failed to work out. The film gets back to the earlier parts of Alvy’s life where he had the first two relationships before Annie, the first time he and Annie met in a badminton, their lives together as partner, the fights they’d been through and the differences they’d discovered during the period of being together.

Of course, another thing that makes Annie Hall exceptional is the classy musical scoring that set the film in a very romantic mood. The psyches of the film’s characters are marvelously developed and the comical lines being thrown are partly satirical but in a pleasantly amusing manner. There are also lots of remarkable techniques being used such as Alvy Singer breaking the fourth wall, addressing the audiences directly by facing and talking straightly to the camera. Woody Allen has obviously reflected here lots of the remarkable artists’ influences on him, definitely we already know it as the Woody Allen’s style when the flow of script draws so much inspiration from literary works, philosophical ideas, Judaism, and psychological issues.

Annie Hall is such a beautiful movie that will give you good laughs and will set you internalizing right after. Truly a nourishing film, this one is more than just your ordinary romantic comedy movie. This is a real masterpiece that hits something deeply onto your heart and mind. So I suggest you also watch this one and tell me then if I'm telling the truth.

For this one, I will give it a rate of nine shots of espresso. Cheers to quality movie!