Viewed in
2011
Formats
DVD
Premise
Woody Allen stars as a divorced New Yorker, dating a high-schooler, who looks for love in his best friend's mistress.
Loved
The music.
Liked
The dialog.
Disliked
The black-and-white cinematography.
Thoughts
A decent Woody Allen flick.
The best part was the excellent selection of cool jazz music from beginning to end. It was very fun to listen to.
Like most of his films, I enjoyed his delightfully funny dialog writing. Here, the characters talked about all sorts of topics, such as relationships, marriage, fidelity, and the typical neuroses that bug Allen. I also got a kick out of the love-triangle twist. It was more like a love-open-square. Or a love-mini-constellation.
The actors were charming, and I appreciated the degree of difficulty in memorizing verbose dialog in elongated takes. It was cool to see Diane Keaton reuniting with the bespectacled whiner.
What bugged me was the intentional black-and-white cinematography. It made some master shots of the city rather interesting, but for the rest of the time, New York City lost its visual beauty and created moments of indecipherable shots during dialog scenes.
I consider myself a fan, though I would never do a Woody Allen marathon. Compared to his other works, Manhattan was on par with the rest, but still a notch below Annie Hall. His films tend to be more fun to listen to than watch, and with the questionable camera choice here, this was more true than ever.
What I would change
Used conventional cinematography.
