Annie Hall

I finally watched Annie Hall. I liked it.

There are people who would read the above lines and smack their foreheads in horror at my obliviousness, much in the way I might react to someone telling me they ran across this movie The Exorcist on HBO and, know what? It was actually pretty good!

But, what the hell. Annie Hall swept the Oscars at the same time Star Wars was coming out. Being I was still in the low single-digits, age-wise, you see where this is going.

Long/short, Annie Hall is the kinda movie that is massively influential without my ever knowing. The whole time I was watching this flick, I was ticking off all the later movies and shows that borrow from it: When Harry Met Sally, Ferris Bueller, The Wedding Crashers, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld, any given romcom set in NYC, etc.

Woody Allen plays a version of himself. He runs across this sweet girl from the Midwest named Annie Hall. They dig each other and start dating. She likes how smart he is. He likes her golly-gee innocence, which is so different from his own smarmy, neurotic, uber-intellectual Manhattan pretentious bullshit.

So, naturally, he does everything in his power -- by financing her "adult education courses" and analysis to "get in touch with her feelings" and pounding his bullshit craziness into her -- to turn Annie Hall into one of the tribe. Once she's just like Woody and all of his awful friends, they begin hating each other. And Woody hates himself.

It's also a really funny movie, very brash and sexy. The writing's amazing.

I'll be honest -- I've never had much interest in Woody Allen. But I realized one day I was judging this guy's entire career from face value, just like the knuckleheads who think every horror movie in the world is like Friday the 13th Part V.

Annie Hall is my first Woody Allen film. We're off to a good start. There's still that whole pretentious Manhattanite thing going on that fills my mouth with bile and my mind with images of attacking Hansen brothers. But, like Larry David's stuff, I can deal with it because, like Larry David, Woody Allen is using these characters to show just how wretched the entire scene is. I can get behind that.

Maybe next I'll figure out who this Fellini fella is I've heard so much about...