Don't Play it Again, Woody

...These superficial touches do little to hide the sappy romanticism that has clogged Allen's sensibility and that—along with his embarrassing self-revelation—is the most wearisome aspect of the movie...

...Most of the material in this dreary saga is familiar from previous Allen movies and books...

...Allen's following today appears to be limited to teenagers, or those who suffer from the same anxieties he does...

...Typecasting her in the part of Annie Hall does equal disservice to her and to us...

...The "serious" stuff tends to be either simple-minded or unintentionally funny...

...With the movie finally on view under the name Annie Hall, it would seem that nervousness was the reason for the elaborate security measures: Allen must have sensed that the audiences, too, would feel no pleasure from this film...

...Allen clearly has more important things in mind, but the repetitious and predictable gags are nonetheless more satisfying than the rest of Annie Hall...

...Allen's failed ambitions are nowhere more awkwardly displayed than in his direction...

...A gag about the merger of Commentary and Dissent into Dysentery (one of the few lines that caused me to chuckle, although no one else laughed at the screening I attended), provides a clue to some of Allen's deeper motives...

...At one point in Annie Hall...

...But now that he is a success, his shtick has become boring, and the world has passed him by...

...The most puzzling thing about Annie Hall is the title...

...But the worst mistake was choosing Keaton to play yet another beautiful neurotic...

...When Allen's humor succeeds, it is at the expense of genuine insight...

...For although it has been hailed as "the most brilliant Woody Allen movie to date" (faint praise even if true), it is actually the worst of his six features (a considerable criticism...

...If so, they demand a much subtler touch than Allen's...

...If Allen keeps abusing himself in the same old familiar ways, he shouldn't be surprised that he is no longer capable of feeling any pleasure—or giving it...

...Alvy and Annie's love scenes are shot in the light of glowing sunsets—the kind of cinematography that is its own best parody...

...Alw proclaims...

...Are Jewish self-hatred and paranoia still funny themes—post-Porrnoy...

...Allen must have been dimly aware of his cultural lag...

...Allen would apparently have us believe, for example, that Alvy's failure wih Annie is largely the result of her predilection for pastrami sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise, tomatoes and lettuce...

...remind us...

...Most of his humor is grounded in an anxious worldview that is curiously dated—the adolescent's fear of social and particularly sexual inadequacy, and the elevation of self-deprecation into the one mode of honesty...

...and about Jewish sexual inadequacy ("I'm one of the few men who suffers from penis envy," Alvy declares...

...to "get things perfect" in his own life...

...The joke seemed to be inserted less for any esthetic purpose than for a private need of the director's, revealed in a Groucho Marx line Alvy quotes: "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member...

...The persona of the skirt-chasing schlemiel made him a star —as excerpts from his appearances on talk shows and in concerts, unabashedly stuck into Annie Hall...

...After two failed marriages (recalled in flashbacks), Alvy meets the eponymous Annie (Diane Keaton, whose real surname is Hall), and their on-again, off-again relationship drags on for an hour and a half before the audience is finally let off the hook...

...There are the New York City jokes about bookstores, movie lines, homosexuals, and Columbia-Jewish-Left-wing-So-cialist-Upper-West-Side intellectuals: "I'm a bigot—but for the Left," he tells a girl, after cracking a joke about Ben Shahn...

...Again, we laugh only at the pretensions...

...Keaton has done some real-life singing, but her voice and style are suited for little beyond the New York City cabarets she has played...

...In a revenge fantasy, when a loudmouthed boor in a movie line pompously refers to Marshall McLuhan, the real McLuhan makes an appearance to shut him up...

...There are the put-downs of life on the West Coast: In California, "the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on red," and "it's so clean . . . because they don't throw their garbage away—they turn it into TV shows...

...When interviewed, cast members would apologize that they had sworn not to reveal any details of the story...

...Never, in fact, has a comedy alluded this often to serious films in such a feebly transparent attempt at unearned intellectual legitimacy...

...And since all the characters except the main one are little more than stick figures who merely feed him a series of straight lines, we learn nothing of importance about any of them...

...Unfortunately it did, at film's end when the couple are separated—a reprise of the song, complete with flashbacks of the happy times they shared...

...As she sang "Old Times," I shuddered in anticipation of what was to come...

...It includes a scene, performed in the movie, that repeats their final meeting, except with the ending Alvy would have preferred—reconciliation...

...the putdown is so awkward that it is really on Allen...

...No technical gimmick is too hackneyed for him to exploit: He uses a split screen to especially bad effect in one poorly conceived sequence contrasting Easter dinner, wasp-style, with a typical Jewish meal...

...Allen even attempts to lampoon this kind of intellectual shallowness...

...Lest I create the slightest false expectations by evoking Allen's old films, I should hasten to note that the new one has neither the zaniness of Bananas or Take the Money and Run, nor the spirited satire of Love and Death or Play It Again, Sam...

...At least that would seem to account for such trendy touches in Annie Hall as the casting of Paul Simon, Carol Kane and Shelley Duvall...

...He does plenty of name-dropping, for instance, as if building characterizations were simply a matter of reducing people to easily recognizable "handles": This woman reads Sylvia Plath, that one National Review, another works for Rolling Stone...

...Present, as well, are the scenes from childhood, including a flashback about what it was like to grow up in a house under the rollercoaster at Coney Island and a fantasy schoolroom sequence that has Alvy's classmates, as children, talk about their future selves ("I used to be a heroin addict—now I'm a methadone addict," says one...

...Finally we get the inevitable gags about Jews and gentiles (Alvy asks Annie, "What did you do—grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting...

...I wish Woody Allen would begin devoting his films to some subject other than his neuroses...

...Are psychotherapy, Left-wing politics, movie buffs, and New York intellectuals still interesting targets for comedy in 1977...

...Two lengthy takes are also wasted on Annie's nightclub performances...

...Similarly, while he pokes fun at a partygoer who vacuously announces that "Grand Illusion is a great movie if you're stoned," movies and movie-going are tiresomely referred to throughout Annie Hall...

...another is "into leather...

...After Alvy and Annie break up, he writes a play about their life together...

...One senses that Allen—who envisions himself as an intellectual—is so envious of his fellow contributors to New Republic and New Yorker, he must disguise his insecurity as disdain...

...when it falls flat or when he strains for seriousness, the best he can offer are cultural stereotypes...

...It should have been named after the protagonist, Alvy Singer, the gag-writer-turned-standup-comedian played by writer-turned-comic-turned-director Allen...

...now I take it to be a symptom of the actress rather than of the characters she portrays...

...Sadly, this Peop/e-magazine approach to moviemaking merely makes them—and him—look silly...

...Allen is using Annie Hall—and us, the audience—in some kind of psychodrama...

...There was a time when I regarded the feeling of reined-in hysteria she always manages to project as a testament to her acting skill...

...Thus despite being billed as a "comic Scenes from a Marriage," the movie treats most of Alvy's problems with women quite clumsily...

...He himself would only say he was working on a "serious comedy"—tentatively called Anhed-onia to describe the psychological state of the main character, who suffers from a complete inability to feel pleasure...

...Don't knock masturbation—it's sex with someone I love...

...superimposed scenes, allowing the characters to talk to themselves...

...Keaton is beginning to grate on my nerves like squeaking chalk on a blackboard...

...At the age of 41, he is long past the time to grow up...

...As Alvy says, "If life were only like this...

...But McLuhan reads his lines clumsily...

...and even an arbitrarily inserted animated cartoon sequence...

...Perhaps more than anything else, this attests to how far out of step Allen is with current cultural attitudes...

...Nevertheless, Allen lingers over her numbers like a moonstruck lover (he and Keaton once lived together), and we can scarcely suspend our disbelief when Annie's career begins to skyrocket...

...You're always trying to get things perfect in art, because it's so hard in life," he says, and that is probably the one bit of truth in this self-serving semi-autobiography...

...subtitles that "translate" the jargon of "interpersonal communication...

...The intense secrecy generated a wave of prerelease speculation that Allen's career was taking a new direction, away from comedy and toward drama...