Manhattan Rating: Release Date: 05 July, 2000 Retail Price: $14.94 OUR Price: $9.99 You SAVE: $4.95! Cast: Woody Allen Diane Keaton Mariel Hemingway Michael Keaton Complete Cast (15 total)

Manhattan Reviews

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Interesting
In general, this is "typical". Typical Allen humor with the actors playing typical roles. Which actually means it's good because there's real talent there.

Other things are at work, however. First of all, we have the opening line about New York, the city that "exists in black and white and pulses to the sounds of Gershwin music." It's a really good image, but I think, unfortunately, that the black and white photography was a bit poor. Also, I, uh... don't really like Gershwin music. It's just kind of loud and obnoxious to me. Which fits New York, but not the nice imagery.

This movie is apparently about "the fall of human values" or something to that effect. Can't say I got too much of that out of it, except that the relationships that pull together at the end are definitely more surprising than you'd think. We expect a different outcome, we're given a different one.

This film is also interesting because it features Allen's character dating a high schooler. I'm not quite clear on the Allen timeline and where he is with his whole crazy relationships thing, so I don't know if this was made before or after he got together with his adopted daughter, but either way it's an interesting thing to put into a film considering the character.

Allen also has the ability to make me burst out in laughter despite myself, even during times when I'm not sure I find it funny.

All in all it has some good technique and is definitely enjoyable to Allen fans. However he's done better and I can't shake off the feeling that it's just too typical for its own good.

--PolarisDiB

Manhattan
Very rarely has a film been as fiercely personal as Woody Allen's Manhattan, it describes a time and place that is at once distant and in immediate reach, and the film is both timely and eternal. The opening of the film is spectacular, Woody shoots New York City in confident and uncompromising first-person beautiful black and white, the sounds of Gershwin sending waves of radiation throughout the screen as Allen narrates the first chapter of the book he is attempting to write. Right away we know that Woody Allen has something to say, something at once simple and unbelievably complex, about a city he loves, the women he's loved and himself. Far from being as cathartic in nature as Husbands And Wives or Hannah And Her Sisters though, the subject of the film is not Woody Allen or Manhattan, it is Manhattan seen and heard through the eyes and ears of the greatest working American director, a glorified, sweeping vision of a place that is unbelievably Romantic and yet dragged down by the constant reminders of reality. As Allen's character struggles between the radiating purity of his 17 year old girlfriend and the seductive manipulation and quasi-intellectual rhetoric of his friend's mistress, Woody the filmmaker struggles between autobiography of himself or portrait of a city, before deciding to use one to get to the other, and constructing out of the film a journey from these two points. It is interesting to compare Allen's film to perhaps the most significant attempt at the same idea, Fellini's ode to Rome, Fellini Roma. Although Manhattan is infinitely more idealistic than Roma, the two filmmakers face a similar dilemma, to create poems to a city, while talking about themselves. The two visions could not be more different. While Fellini painted a monochrome chaotic picture of disaster and shattered life in a whirlwind of misplaced joy, Allen dwells on what he calls the `hustle-bustle' of the city, and romanticizes it. While Fellini shoots in color, Allen shoots in black and white, while Fellini finds death at the origin of his city, Allen finds life. As it is Manhattan is neither autobiography nor portrait of a time or place but the midway point between the two, which reunites them and makes the two inseparable.

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