The Underrated Works of Woody Allen

Small Time Crooks has a premise alone that's worthy of praise; that's a great set-up. The execution is great, too, of course, but STC's premise is great.

Love Broadway Danny Rose, too.

I haven't seen Another Woman yet (but intend to).

To some extent, I suppose it shouldn't surprise that vast chunks of Allen's work gets left behind or forgotten because he's so bloody prolific. But, it's still a shame that nobody does a deep-dive.

I get this with classic rock stations, too. The other day I was listening to one that lauded Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite for Destruction (I guess it's classic rock) for having great deep cuts and unknown songs all over it. Then he played Sweet Child o' Mine.

People should talk about, watch, and love Annie Hall until doomsday - don't get me wrong - but it'd be a shame if people forgot about To Rome with Love just because it was late Allen, and therefore, unpopular.

I haven't seen Scenes from a Mall yet.

Sleeper's great. It's made a couple top sci-fi lists over the years, which I always love, that they'd recognize it for how great it was and also just that they'd include a comedy.

His original premise idea was very intriguing, too, for it to be a two-part epic with an intermission, and the first half would be the present and the last half would be the future, pre- and post-cryo-sleep.

I saw Scenes From a Mall when it played in theaters. I was looking forward to it because I was already a huge fan of Woody and Paul Mazursky's films and had enjoyed performances from the talented Bette Midler. My jaw dropped when I saw how awful it was. It was a huge disappointment from such talented people. Years later I purchased a cheap DVD of it just to see if it was as terrible as I remembered. It was.

I consider Love and Death to be the last of his "early" films, which were almost entirely comic, and as a sort of "bridge" into his next phase, in which he starts really going after the human condition. I'm not saying Sleeper wasn't a great satire, just that it was more about coming up with funny premises for a sci-fi setting, not so much about commentary.

Love and Death put those two - BIG - themes front-and-centre and, although it's still really silly (in the best way), it's starting to get that real Woody Allen bent towards philosophy in ways that weren't as emphasized, prominent, or in-depth in his early stuff.

In short: I love it. I love it more with each passing year, and it becomes more and more a rich experience. It's got such great layers: comedy on the surface, philosophy bubbling underneath, but that's all shot through with the Russian lit angle, the nods to cinematography of epics, and so forth. It's really something.

I recently watched The Curse of the Jade Scorpion in black and white and it was really great. He got the look and feel of old cinema so well that it felt "right" in black and white.

I saw Alice for the first time a couple years ago, and I have to agree with you. I didn't even know if it was going to be one of his comedies or dramas, so it was just pleasant surprise after pleasant surprise. It's one of his magic-real films (like Purple Rose of Cairo or Midnight in Paris) and those are always very good. He's really clever with that kind of thing, even though people don't think of him as a fantasist.

Love and Death is, I think, his *funniest* film. It's got the most laughs, for me. It's not my favourite, although it would be top-five I think, but it is minute-by-minute, laugh-by-laugh the funniest one. It's also (as I see it) the "transition film" between his earlier, madcap, Marx Brothers-esque films (like Bananas) and his "dramedy" work like Annie Hall.

It's interesting to me, on that note, that you don't like Annie Hall, because I see it as a kind of logical extension of Love and Death in many ways - diving into the philosophy and human relationships as much as the absurdism. What is it about Annie Hall you didn't really like?

I can't remember seeing that; I will be looking it up!