Review: Annie Hall

Annie Hall (1977)
Cert: 15 / 89 mins / Dir. Woody Allen / Trailer



Now I'm in choppy waters. Woody Allen is almost a genre in himself, and one I'm nowhere near familiar enough with to call myself a film-geek. I relate to Allen's neuroses so much I know I need to do a concentrated season of his work (but that's a programme for another time). Now obviously, Woody Allen does his 'one film a year' thing (a feat which I'm in awe of, irrespective of how much I enjoy or gripe about his films), and obviously I've only seen a small percentage of those works. What this means is that I watched Annie Hall in isolation, and while even I know that it's Allen at his self-analysing best, I don't know how it fits into his other movies around that time.

Anyhow, I enjoyed Annie Hall very much; it's rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but I smirked throughout. Although it often seems that the writing itself is a lot better than the directing and the acting (even if Allen and Diane Keaton are magnificent). At times it almost feels as if the screenplay is ahead of its time and is just waiting for film-making to catch up and do it justice. For a film of the seventies it's incredibly meta, but the production makes things a little disjointed, and for the entire runtime I felt like I was waiting for it to slow down and start properly.
That's probably the point though, right? Let me know in the comments.

Although as fine as Annie Hall is, it's a conceited film which has a greatest-hits reel of itself in its own final moments, Woody Allen or otherwise…

No, to be honest I've been a bit preoccupied with the other film from 1977…



I am.



I would, in a Sunday-night, bottle-of-wine sort of a way.



There isn't.



Annie Hall features a cameo appearance from Christopher Walken, who starred in Pulp Fiction along with Sam 'Windu' Jackson.







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