Movie Log: Manhattan

I saw most of Woody Allen's "earlier, funnier" movies back in high school, but I petered out somewhere before this and Annie Hall. So, since I'm watching a lot of twenty-year-old comedies, I figured it was time to catch up a bit on the Woodman.

First of all, this has some of the loudest, most intrusive incidental music in the known universe -- coming right after scenes of mumbled quick dialogue (on a DVD with no English-language subtitles) -- which made for lots and lots of volume shifts up and down just to try to listen to the damn thing.

And the black-and-white looks very murky on a standard TV in a basement with other lights on -- I imagine it was gorgeous in a first-run theater, twenty-five years ago, but I don't exactly have access to that, now do I?

So it was hard to concentrate on the movie itself; physically watching and listening to it was difficult. It's not as funny as I hoped (I think the movie I wanted is Annie Hall), and it definitely shows Allen sliding down the slope of casting himself as the charismatic, womanizing, central male figure even when he really doesn't fit (without being rich and famous Woody Allen, as he is in real life). The fact that he's dating seventeen-year-old Mariel Hemingway, and this is only a minor point of interest, is either an indication that the late '70s really were a different time, or Allen's nudge that the movie can't be taken as much on the surface as it appears.

Anyway: I liked it, and I watched it to the end, but I didn't love it. It's one of those movies that makes me wish I lived in New York (preferably also having magically become single, rich, thin, devastatingly handsome -- well, more so -- and amazingly witty -- again, more so), so I guess that's a positive.

Anyone who wants to watch this and get the full effect, though, needs a serious home theater set-up: big, good screen, low lights, and serious soundproofing.