Gaming

Woody Allen

Woody Allen has been writing and directing a new film project every year for the last half century, he has also acted in many of them, although in recent years he often takes on a minor role, bringing the comic relief or simply not. appear at all. Even from behind the camera, you know it’s a Woody Allen movie of the black-and-white opening titles, the traditional jazz soundtrack, and the opening lines of dialogue brimming with neurosis and witty lines full of existential angst about the balance of the love and life in urban cities, predominantly New. York.

I had just turned 14 when my parents allowed me to stay up late on a school night to experience my first Woody Allen movie. It was 1985 and we didn’t have a video recorder yet, so this meant seeing it all live or losing it. Around the same time I discovered the films of the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Peter Sellers, Mel Brooks and Monty Python, so I saw Sleeper for the first time with an appreciation for parody, parody and satire, but there was never seen the movie. Woody Allen before and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but I quickly became enthusiastic about Miles Monroe as he tried to come to terms with futuristic life after being cryogenically frozen for 200 years.

Sleeper, like Bananas before, had a very thin plot, involving a clumsy coward who eventually wins the day and the girl, on which to hang gags of all shapes and sizes. It was not until Love and Death in 1975 that Allen began to introduce the philosophical themes of which his films would become synonymous, although his main concern is to provoke laughter while making fun of the great works of Russian literature of the Napoleonic era; It is still my favorite of his “first funny movies”.

While the influences of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini are always evident in Allen’s films, he managed to create his own unique cinematic style with Annie Hall and Manhattan, between the ages of 15 and 18, I must have seen both films at least once year. month; his focal point of not finding the ideal partner while keeping a romantic spirit alive provided me, as a somewhat bookish teenager going through a series of unrequited adolescent crushes, a real comfort. With Manhattan I started my own love story with New York City and the vibrant melodies of George Gershwin and the sharp black and white photography of Gordon Willis still gives me a rush every time I go through it.

Of Allen’s many films, if I were to take one to a desert island, I think it would be 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. Here he manages to mix comedy and romance with a serious essay on crime and punishment, with a dramatic impact reminiscent of to Arthur Miller. Death of a seller. Ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal, an outstanding performance by Martin Landau, grew up in a strictly Orthodox Jewish family. He believes that God’s eyes see everything, so when he uses his ill-reputed brother Jack’s mob connections to ‘erase’ his blackmailer lover, who threatens to destroy his world, he hopes to receive divine retribution, without However, it does not, in fact it thrives and is never linked to the death that is dismissed by the police as a result of a robbery; a serious subject but an equally funny and moving movie, for me Allen in his prime.

In the next few weeks I will review Woody Allen’s films in greater detail and hope that the financially troubled MGM film studio finalizes a salvage agreement with Warner Bros. and begins releasing their previous catalog on Blu-ray because these great films deserve to be seen in secret by a new audience.

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