Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon)

Abracadaver.

Perhaps one of the horror genre's more enduring and uniquely humorous classics, "Re-Animator" is kind of like a respectful bastardization of H.P. Lovecraft's short story (entitled "Herbert West: Reanimator"), and may also be seen as a mock ode to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein". It is intentionally campy in its set-up and fittingly goofy in some of its over-the-top gore, not to mention that Jeffrey Combs' insanely cult performance is a genuine thing of 'slapstick horror' legend. Sure, the film may not have aged that particularly well especially in moments when it actually tries to scare the bejeezus out of us viewers, but it still holds up quite nicely as an absurdist effort to squeeze out something fresh and conceptually new from the seemingly exhaustive world of the undead. Suddenly, at least through director Stuart Gordon's outrageously horrific playfulness, hospital morgues aren't that monastically creepy anymore, and medical schools not much hives of bright minds but of psychotic lobotomists and of future Josef Mengeles. 

Indeed, it's a twisted and perverted world that the characters of "Re-Animator" live in; add up Jeffrey Combs' Herbert West, the 'roommate from hell'/'mad medical student' who has ingeniously created a serum that can bring dead people back to life, into the mix and you've got one hell of a, well, hell ride into the bloody corners of human anatomy and back. The film may not be as smooth as the "Evil Dead" trilogy in terms of blood-drenched shtick, but at least, it can boast of an iconic image long-time fans of the horror genre can very well recognize: and that is of Herbert West looking somewhere near the camera, pointy-lipped and all, armed and ready with his serum-filled syringe. He may not be as romantically heroic as Lionel in "Braindead", as slick as Ash in "Evil Dead II", or as manly as MacReady in "The Thing", but his persistent madness oozes a kind of detached, ironically magnetic charm that, despite being despicable by default, still makes him very easy to root for. It's also quite nice to see the Dan Cain character (played by Bruce Abbott), a medical student who becomes West's roommate, unusually serving as both confidant and foil to West's loony bin aspirations at the same time. Even David Gale, playing the villainous Dr. Carl Hill, is also quite enjoyable to watch even though his performance screams 'poor man's Christopher Lee' all over. 

The special effects, although indelibly cartoonish even if you try to convince yourself that this is a serious horror picture, are top-notch and hard to look away from, but in a very humorously implausible kind of way. But be that as it may, "Re-Animator" is still a thoroughly entertaining picture with enough obligatory gore, quotable one-liners, and even an apt exposure of flesh, to satisfy the red-blooded cravings of an average horror fan. Though I must admit that the film's climax is probably better on paper than when it was finally executed by Stuart Gordon and company on-screen, the film is still tons of fun, thanks of course to its dreadful kind of energy, tongue-in-cheek execution, and a dose of wit that's even sharper than the hypodermic needle on Herbert West's big-ass syringe. The only problem, though, is that it has every right to go out with an unprecedented kind of vomit-inducing bang, but has instead chosen not to. And is that an iteration of Bernard Herrmann's "Psycho" score?

FINAL RATING

Zerkalo (Andrei Tarkovsky)

Aleksei.

Coming into Andrei Tarkovsky's "Zerkalo" with only "Stalker" in my 'already watched' list, I was caught by its stream-of-consciousness style with my tattered pants down. Well, I should have known, it is a Tarkovsky film after all. Indeed, "Zerkalo" is the kind of film that won't comfort you with its immediate meanings. Instead, what it will do is befuddle you with its visuals, floor you with its powerful, wisdom-infused poetry and, ultimately, help you reach your own personal epiphany. 

     

Although it is commonly viewed as one of Tarkovsky's most inaccessible films, I think I must beg to differ. Sure, it is a non-chronological, dream-like film, but it's not that hard to absorb. Sure, to comprehend it fully and come up with your own meaning, shot-per-shot, truly is a heavily analytical chore, but its essence, that of the lucid story of a man named Aleksei (a cinematic avatar of Andrei Tarkovsky himself) and his last-minute retreat to his fragmented memories, is not that hard to digest. In fact, with it being a most personal film by Tarkovsky, who are we to intervene with what he really means? Perhaps, "Zerkalo" has but a single, unifying definition, and perhaps it is only Tarkovsky who knows it deep inside, but the film, in all its lush visual glory, is very easy to associate with one's own experiences and with one's own life; if you had ever reflected upon your own existence, that is. 

     

In all fairness, "Zerkalo" can easily be accused of pretense, and maybe it is fair to say that it truly defies or even negates comprehension, and that, on a more esoteric note, we must first read about Russian history to really be at ease with the film. But, really, do you need textbook lessons when what's unraveling in front of you instantly connects on a personal level? I think not. Watch the film solely to decipher its meaning, and you may utterly be frustrated. But watch the film to purely reflect on its life-affirming visual poetry, and you will be rewarded a hundredfold.

     

After watching the film, there was a subtle lump in my throat, and my eyes seem to be on the verge of something. But was it tears? I do not know, and neither the sensation that I've felt at that very moment. Indeed, "Zerkalo" is unlike any film I've ever watched or experienced; it's also a film that can easily disprove certain things you thought you know about life. 

     

For starters, it's a film that's more than worthy of fervent celebration, and that Tarkovsky is worthy of praise not just as a filmmaker but also as a plaintive man who was able to look between the lines and present what may be the most honest reflection on war, the transience of time, and the briefness of life ever filmed, that of which can only be rivaled by Dalton Trumbo's earlier film "Johnny Got His Gun". Indeed, I was touched and I was affected, and the next thing I know, I was watching the film the second time in one night, and after wrapping up my second viewing, I was once again blown away, and I was also able to come up with my own sad interpretation of the whole film: That more than it is a film about a dying man's cerebral swan song, it is also about him coming to terms with a painful truth that has haunted him all his life: that he was, for a lack of a better term, an 'unwanted' child. 

     

The key scene to support my idea is the moment when Aleksei's mother (Margarita Terekhova) queasily walks away after seeing a sleeping little boy and then subsequently hearing the fact that the said boy's father and mother wants a little girl after all ("He put us up to a lot of trouble, little rascal," said the mother). In my view, she has walked away not just because she can't take in such an honest truth but also because she identifies herself with the same parental sentiment. Pay attention then at the final, heart-breaking scene (presumably a distant flashback) where she was asked by her husband if whether she likes a boy or a girl for a child. Unsure, anxious and on the verge of tears, she merely answered with an apprehensive smile. And then, we see her next as an old lady, walking through some dingy shrubberies with two children in tow, a boy (presumably Aleksei) and a girl. We see her walk hand-in-hand with the little girl, but we also see how obviously indifferent she is towards the boy, who merely trails behind. And as the camera pans slowly to the left (while zooming out) to show the path being tread by the old lady and the two children, we then see a mysterious man standing in the distance, staring intently at the three of them. 

     

Who is he supposed to be? In my perspective, it's the adult Aleksei, who can finally look at this particular scene of 'truth' (that his mother, after all, is apathetic towards his existence) without much hurt or hesitation anymore. The film, ultimately, is about a sort of emotional pain that can only be healed by confronting one's own memories, and by doing so, Aleksei has emotionally liberated himself. After all, the mirror that the film is pertaining to is in fact our most distant dreams and memories: two artifacts of the soul that we can stand in front of and look closely to so that we can examine what's wrong with ourselves, and the lives we have lived.   

     

"My purpose is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness," says Tarkovsky, who, in this film, has helped not just his audience but also himself. "Zerkalo" is heavy cinema, but just like any Tarkovsky films, the perceived heaviness of his films is most certainly followed by an unexpected episode of euphoria. I know, because I've felt it.

FINAL RATING

 

Drowning by Numbers (Peter Greenaway)

Swimming.

If Kubrick's attention to visual composition as a photographer shows in his masterful films, then I can say just the same for Peter Greenaway, whose artistic sensibilities as a painter bleed through the constructions of his films' imagery. Take for example the scene here in "Drowning by Numbers" where a man, after drowning, lies peacefully in the pavement, with the camera looking at him from his feet. The scene, a moment of surprising serenity in a film that's filled with sexual and psychological oddities, religiously echoes its source inspiration, which is Andrea Mantegna's "The Lamentation over the Dead Christ". 

     

Such moments, for me, are what make Peter Greenaway's films more endearing to the audience, despite the fact they are often times filled with macabre violence and are adamant in its departure from conventional storytelling. But as what Greenaway has once said, he is drawn towards a form of cinema that is truly non-narrative, and here in "Drowning by Numbers", a truly challenging film that plays a macabre numbers game on sex and death, it is very much evident. 

     

Suggestive of the film's title, it is indeed, on surface level, about numbers and about drowning. But with Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker who, a year later, was able to create a cannibalistic parable in the form of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" and subtly analogize it with the evils of Thatcherism, the thematic assumptions that's represented by the film's "Drowning by Numbers" title is just too deceptively simple and misleading. 

     

But of course, the film sure has a semblance of a plot: A harmless-looking mother (Joan Plowright) and her two daughters (Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson), all of which are named Cissie, have this strange, almost fetishistic inclination of drowning their respective husbands and lovers. Along then comes Madgett (Bernard Hill), the local coroner who, because of his belief that the women will repay him with rich sexual favors, decides to help them in covering up their murderous deeds via falsely declared causes of deaths (heart attack and death by misadventure seem to be his favorites). 

     

Again, the story seems so deceptively light and, in true noir tradition, formulaic. But let's again be reminded that Peter Greenaway is on the helm, so expect him to play cinema, a form that he has long believed to have died many years ago, into his utmost advantage and in complete conformity to his one-of-a-kind vision. With numbers 1 to 100 appearing randomly (but chronologically) all throughout the film, be it in the shirts of quirky joggers or tattooed into the skins of forlorn cows, Greenaway is, in a way, making his audience aware of the uncomfortable fact that death is always around the corner and that it is not a scythe-holding, black-hooded man that may bring it to us but mere numerals. This, from where I look at it, stays true to Greenaway's fear that "The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.”

      

With his visual and thematic approach for this film, his apprehensive look at numbers surely and clearly shows, all while some calmly fatal horseplay of sex and murder proceeds in the foreground, not to mention some consistent feminist undertones that are reminiscent of femme fatale films of years past. 

     

Interesting enough, what makes "Drowning by Numbers" such a resonant art film is not its utter thematic seriousness but its morbid playfulness that can be aptly mistaken as a form of harsh humor. Specifically, I'm talking about the film's unique integration of bizarre games (invented specifically for the film), all of which are explained in aching detail (by Madgett's son Smut, played by Jason Edwards), into the story. Granted, it may or may not be truly integral to the whole film, but then again, that's one of those artistic liberties that separate a true visionary like Greenaway from all the others. Adamant of not taking the easy way out, he was able to punctuate the film's claim that 'death' can be liken to a game in a very exciting and fresh manner (partnered with Michael Nyman's classical scoring). 

     

Also, "Drowning by Numbers'" use of enforced repetition, which, for some, is quite discomforting in the context of storytelling, is fitting for the film's wholly playful nature. Some even argue that the film's story could have been easily told in 1 hour, but keep in mind that Peter Greenaway, essentially, is not a narrative filmmaker so the joke's on whoever said that. After all, Greenaway clings on to the belief that every medium has to undergo a kind of redevelopment and evolution. "Drowning by Numbers", by deconstructing the traditional means of telling a story, is a textbook example of such.

     

As a parting quote, Peter Greenaway has once stated that "We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death." Surely, that may be the case for our final hurrahs, but such is not the same case for film as an art form because it is independently powerful in its own right, and some form of manipulation, so as to attain a higher form of message transmission, emotional evocation and expression, wouldn't really hurt. Greenaway is quite aware of that fact.

FINAL RATING

Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard)

On the run and going wild.

With the last Jean-Luc Godard film that I have watched (which is "Weekend") tracing back about 3 years ago, that of which I also vividly remember of not liking that much, it's genuinely reinvigorating to watch some of his earlier, more beloved works that are, undoubtedly, the patented heart and soul of the French New Wave. In this instance, it is "Pierrot le Fou", a masterful adventure film about love, self-discovery and, ultimately, self-destruction. But with Godard on the helm, nothing is particularly absolute.  

     

Starring the charismatic yet mischievous-looking Jean-Paul Belmondo and the enticingly energetic Anna Karina, the film, about two star-crossed, perennially on-the-run lovers, is packed with immense intellectual energy and colorful playfulness characteristic of the aforementioned film movement.

     

Although the film sure has a conventional story that's quite easy to follow, it's never the main priority. Instead, "Pierrot le Fou" is a film that follows the impulse not of its surface narrative but of the transgressive potentials the film medium has. In short, "Pierrot le Fou" is a half-comic, half-poetic intimation of cinema itself, and there's never a more perfect filmmaker to handle it than Godard himself.

     

Personally, the key to enjoy "Pierrot le Fou" more is not to be too conscious and reliant of the plot because if you'll be, the film has numerous elements that can surely and gravely deviate from its focus. One of them, of course, is the seemingly disjointed, pseudo-romantic yet nonetheless poetic utterances by Belmondo's titular character. Another is the film's inclusion of random, millisecond appearances of numerous neon signs, some of which read the words 'cinema' and 'life'.

     

These minute details, obviously, are nothing but sheer experimental frolic on Godard's part, which, admittedly, has nonetheless added an additional spark of uniqueness to the film's entirety.

     

"Film is like a battleground. There's love, hate, action, violence, death… in one word: emotions," said Samuel Fuller, who appeared in "Pierrot le Fou" as himself. In a way, this cameo by the said filmmaker is a deliberate embrace of irony on Godard's part, who, from what I think, believes that cinema is so much more than emotions. Sure, they (the emotions) may slightly further a storyline, motivate some characters and justify some scenes, but ultimately, what Godard is more concerned about is his audience's intellectual and subtly didactic journey through the heart and pulse of cinema itself. Or, to be more exact, 'his' own vision of cinema: a vision where anything goes, where obscure music and high-brow literature fit nicely in mundanely immature conversations and situations, and where blood and violence seem highly inconsequential. Hell, even highway accidents have never looked more picturesque and unearthly than in "Pierrot le Fou" (but then again, there's that epic tracking shot in "Weekend").

     

"It's not really a film, it's an attempt at cinema," Godard once said about "Pierrot le Fou". Well, if "Pierrot le Fou" is not, in its basic essence, a film, then perhaps Belmondo's Pierrot (oh sorry, his name is Ferdinand) and Karina's Marianne are not much characters themselves than they are mere devices for Godard to kick-start a necessary road trip and to make his ultimate goal, which is to explore the then-unchartered frontiers of postmodern cinema, as humanly and tangibly flawed as possible. And alas, he has pulled it off.

     

Indeed, "Pierrot le Fou" is a film that's worthy of many future revisits. For me, the film has definitely achieved what many art films haven't, and that is to be thematically dense and genuinely enjoyable at the same breath. Plus, amidst its pop-intellectual discourse about nothing and everything, it has also raised quite a compelling outlook on existence; that after all is said and done', 'we are just dead men on parole.' 

FINAL RATING

Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa)

To live.

"This stomach belongs to the protagonist of our story," says a narrator, who's pertaining to an x-ray image of a stomach obviously ripe with cancerous complications. And so begins "Ikiru", a meditative film of quiet power that tackles mortality and life's purpose yet also dips its fingers on issues concerning the cons of bureaucracy. The film's protagonist is Kanji Watanabe, an old man who seems to be no more alive than a dysfunctional machine.

     

In many ways, films like "Scent of a Woman" and "About Schmidt" derive from "Ikiru's" main emotional drive, which is as timeless as it is life-affirming. As what the film suggests, maybe it is only in the face of death and mortal desperation will we muster change and find true significance; indeed, life is brief. In the words of the narrator in "Fight Club": "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time".

     

Takashi Shimura, who has previously played the woodcutter in "Rashomon" and who will later play, after this film, the noble Kambei in "Seven Samurai", plays Watanabe, a bureaucrat who, for the longest time, has led an uneventful life drained of all meaning or worth. Making his living by stamping insignificant papers for approval, he is as mechanized and emotionless as he can be. But in one ill-fated day, he is diagnosed with stomach cancer. According to the doctor, he has around six months to live. 

     

Devastated, Watanabe has never felt more strangely detached from the land of the living. His already hunched posture even becoming more contorted and his already fragmented articulation of words becoming even more so, Watanabe, as maybe what Kurosawa has intended, is the defining image of a modern man who has nothing to say about his life other than the painful fact that he has merely 'lived'. 

     

Going home, Watanabe then pitifully tries to tell his son about his terminal illness but is discouraged by the latter's coldness. Finding no sense of belongingness either in his own home (with his son being mainly concerned not with his father's well-being but with his pension) or in his work, he suddenly had this craving to just lash out. Guided by a struggling novelist, Watanabe then tries to navigate the busy, booze-laden nightlife of '50s Japan to find out whether or not it can make up for his final days. As it turns out, it does not. 

    

After his bar-hopping misfire, he then gets closer to a young woman named Toyo, an office subordinate of his who has recently tendered her resignation in Watanabe's office in favor of working in a toy factory, and whose exuberant and pure love for life leaves Watanabe in utter awe and in disgruntled fascination.

     

Miki Odagiri, who plays Toyo, has this distinct kind of energy that finely balances out Takashi Shimura's seemingly stagnant and doomed presence. By often framing Shimura's Watanabe, hunched, blank-eyed and ever-brooding, in the foreground and Odagiri's Toyo in the not-so-distant background, Kurosawa was constantly able to highlight the two characters' contrasting traits, behaviors and overall existence within the spatial landscapes of the film.     

     

"…In other words, why are you so incredibly alive?" Watanabe blurts out to Toyo, who innocently mistakes his desperate need to understand his own existence as romantic advances. Toyo answered him that all she does is work and eat. She then gets a toy rabbit from her bag, one of the many products being made in the toy factory where she's employed; "Making them (the toy rabbits), I feel like I'm playing with every baby in Japan," Kimura then said. 

     

Seemingly refreshed from Toyo's all-too-naïve yet honest response, Watanabe then sets out to do something that may hopefully make him matter. In a stunning turn of events, Watanabe transforms from an old nobody to a defiant spirit reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith determined to will through the lethargic incompetency of the city hall officials so that he can convince them to turn a mosquito-laden cesspool into a children's park.     

     

Much like "Rashomon", we then get to see another epistemological discourse on Kurosawa's part, this time not about the truth (or the lack thereof) behind a mysterious murder but about the legacy of a man who everybody never expected to have left one. And by piecing together some fragmentary moments in Watanabe's life as witnessed by his co-workers, from his brave persistence to stand up for the children's park to his starry-eyed admiration of the sunset, we then finally arrive at what Watanabe is looking for all his life: meaning and self-worth. 

     

"Ikiru", which literally means "To Live", is a an affecting film that explores man's search for existential meaning not through philosophically sophisticated means that may alienate viewers but realistically through an old man's eyes who just want to be at peace with those around him and, more importantly, with himself. Despite of "Ikiru's" apparent and sometimes much too overwhelming commentary on political bureaucracy, I'd rather remember it as an honest and reflective film about mortality and the often undermined beauty of life; simple as that. This then reminds me of a quote by Monty Python's Michael Palin: "Don't talk about living, just live".

FINAL RATING

In Bruges (Martin Mcdonagh)

Ken and Ray, in f***in' Bruges.

A second viewing.

Oh, the beauty of style and substance. Stripping down the very essence of filmmaking and wherever which way you try to go around its principles, it will just bring you back to these simple words. "In Bruges", a slick crime comedy, a most surprisingly solid morality play and a meditative travelogue that explores the historical and religious significance of the much-preserved medieval sights of Belgium's Bruges, is an exemplary flag-carrier of the two nouns. It's like a film that could have been directed by Guy Ritchie but with an added strength by way of its thematic depth.

If the aforementioned British director, whose films I particularly admire but have never completely drooled and obsessed over, puts contemporary gangsterism into certain feats of absurdist twists of fates and distortion of events, "In Bruges'" director Martin Mcdonagh had, in some ways, also incorporated such playfully omniscient style into his characters but only as a superficially conscious device. Mcdonagh has put his two protagonists, Ken (the great Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (a revelatory performance by Colin Farrell which won him a Golden Globe) into the 'fairy tale-like' corners of Bruges because of a botched hit, which claimed the life of a child, but dared not to laugh at their predicament.

Sure, it's easy for the film to elicit sardonic smiles and chuckles from its audience judging from the scenario alone, which centers on the idea of two seemingly hardened criminals entrapped in an ennui-inspiring place, especially for people like them which the film has assumed to despise culture and history (such is not the case for Ken, it is for Ray). But unlike Ritchie's half-serious gangster films, "In Bruges" looks humorous only in its very surface. It is very distinct on the way it has conveyed the ever-recurring and ever-haunting notions of guilt and redemption without looking forced at the slightest bit. Maybe it's Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell's performances, maybe it is the freshness of the material itself, or maybe it is the brilliant cinematography, by Eigil Bryld, and musical score, by Carter Burwell. But to argue for each side would be very futile. Maybe, they just all work together perfectly.

And then there's Ralph Fiennes, whose portrayal of the rabid but highly principled gangster Harry Waters, the man who has sent Ken and Ray into the dreamy, cobble stone-laden streets of Bruges because of the latter's careless mistake, has caused many viewers to compare or even consider his performance as something of a homage to Ben Kingsley's unexpected turn as the unpredictable crime boss Don Logan in "Sexy Beast".

With the help of the film's great screenplay filled with trivial cues and modern conversationalist tones, which we just can't deny to have been influenced one way or another by "Pulp Fiction", Fiennes' character, which has the negative potential to be very caricature-like, passed off as somewhat believable and genuinely menacing in his distinct way.

We know of his principles, we know that he does not stand for killing innocent people, especially children, and we know that if some unexpected shit hits the fan, he won't think twice to fix everything himself and lull breakers of his code into an eternal sleep. His beliefs are forged of extremism, his methods violent but strangely understandable, his paradoxical impulse to kill someone who wrongly killed somebody is harshly immediate but completely undeniable.

Looking at the parallels of the film's themes with biblical concepts of hell, purgatory and the penance for sins, 'Bruges' might as well be both the purgatory and hell, and the penance for sins may be the film's depiction of the psychological manifestation of guilt, or may also be Harry himself, who just arrived, armed with a handgun and some 'dumdums', to collect.

"In Bruges" surely has been nothing but a sleeper hit more than 3 years ago, with the likes of "Slumdog Millionaire" and "The Dark Knight" taking over and dominating 2008's cinematic scene. Sure, that's also how I perceived this film at the time: A fascinatingly humorous, uniquely made crime film and nothing more (although I saw my 2008's top 10 movie lists on my old blog and saw it ranked at no. 3. I may just need to move it up a bit higher). But after rewatching it to once again witness its richly layered take regarding the context of existential woes, personal demons and bitter regret unfold in a beautiful ballet of humor and violence, it is, I can personally say, one of the greatest postmodern crime films in existence and simply put one of the decade's best films.

FINAL RATING

Annie Hall (Woody Allen)

Annie and Alvy, Diane and Woody; it's either way.

A second viewing.

Looking at the gallery of the previous Oscar winners for best picture, "Annie Hall" is definitely one of the most unorthodox and unglazed of all the films that have won the coveted prize. No majestic scope, no larger-than-life characters and no unreachable emotional core, but only an accessibly psychoanalytical and pop-intellectual presence of Woody Allen and his one-liners. Oh, and there's also the impeccable Diane Keaton as the titular character (whose real name is, well you've guessed it: Diane 'Annie' Hall) whose unassumingly fluctuating romance with Allen's character Alvy Singer founds the film's distinct postmodernist approach to the uber-complicated thing we all call 'love'.

Opening scenes meter what we can expect from a particular film's wholeness, be it an initial action scene or a non-linear middle scene pushed right into the beginning. We are introduced into "Annie Hall" with a monologue by Woody Allen, to which I'm not sure if he's uttering his entry comic speech as him being Alvy Singer, the other way around or a random combination of both. Either way, it's a subtle delivery that may not give the immediate feel of the film but definitely serves unto us the fragile wholeness of our neurotic main character. Why is he even talking to us in the first place? Is he really that lonely in his own reality of 'death' and isolated 'mental masturbation' that he wills himself to break the fourth wall?

Unlike other 'love' stories that preceded "Annie Hall" which starts with impossible chance encounters and ends with reconciliations, this film started somewhere where Alvy and Annie's romantic complications are at an all-time high but their emotional excitement for each other at an all-time low. Then like an unsure blend of fantasy and reality, the film then traces the pieces of how this 'nervous romance' came to be, or at least something like that. But with the tone of the film, which I believe can go on for days and days (the movie itself) even without an audience (this Woody Allen fellow really talks a lot), it's apt to say that the film really couldn't care less.

The ability to enact both a pessimistic existential viewpoint (according to Alvy, the 'horrible' and the 'miserable' are the only dividends of life) and an indifferent humor throughout yet hints on an underlying warmth beneath its 'foreskin'. This is one of the unique aspects of the film which certainly gave it the prestigious Oscar award. Right now, the said award is nothing but history, and although I think that "Annie Hall" hasn't aged that well, its portrayal of the distorted nuances of 'love' and 'contemporary existence' never did.

Written and directed by Woody Allen himself, I know that it's not quite right, chronologically and qualitatively speaking, that I was introduced into Allen's works (not counting "Vicky Cristina Barcelona") via "Annie Hall", a film that is widely considered to be the artistic zenith of his film career.

Now on the other hand, although I loved every moment of how Woody Allen and Diane Keaton's effortless chemistry pervades the screen through and through, their dialogue exchanges that seem like trivial conversations between two not-so-special souls and their consummate embraces and kisses amidst a backdrop of a surprisingly subdued New York City (photography by Gordon Willis), I really can't see myself as Alvy Singer.

Reckon how other 'love story' heroes mirror us one way or another? This is Woody Allen's difference. He can look as plain, thin and 'balding' as he is, but at least, his Alvy Singer is never completely us. A character that is molded more out of clumsy ubiquity (based on his sometimes alienating but seemingly all-knowing one-bit opinions and whatnot) than crazy human simplicity.

Granted, "Annie Hall" is a complex film of romantic proportions, but its heart lies within two key jokes uttered by Alvy himself: the humorous 'elderly women' analogy and the 'chicken brother' joke. Unnoticed as it may seem, these jokes weren't just meant to give a start and end transition for the whole film but a perceptive change for Alvy Singer himself. And like the autobiographical stage play that he has created near the end of the film, after all his musings about the futility of life and the importance of death, he simply wants his romance warm and eternalized, just like everyone else.

FINAL RATING