It’s unfair to hold Woody Allen to the standard he set 35 years ago with “Annie Hall.”

Allen’s romantic comedy, which beat out “Star Wars” for the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, remains an unabashed delight in its newly minted Blu-ray format. You’ll fall in love with Miss La-dee-dah herself, Diane Keaton, and marvel how Allen could smuggle in so many laughs without sacrificing the film’s bittersweet core.

It’s that rare comedy that hasn’t aged a minute, even if we still scratch our heads over why a stunner like Annie would fall so hard for a neurotic comedian.

What’s more remarkable about re-watching the film is seeing how Allen the artist handled the political divide then … and now.

In “Annie Hall,” Allen’s Alvy Singer is a liberal stand-up comic who is seen at one point performing for an Adlai Stevenson fundraiser. It’s clear from that sequence, and from other stream-of-conscious bits, that he’s a man of the Left. Yet Alvy never rubs us the wrong way no matter how he kevetches about his inability to be truthful to his girlfriends or his unabiding hate for the Left Coast.

Contrast that demeanor to two of Allen’s more recent films, “Whatever Works” and “Midnight in Paris.”

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With six feature credits already under his belt, some of them classics, co-writer/director Woody Allen finally became Woody Allen with the brilliant “Annie Hall,” and in doing so would be rightfully rewarded with four major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Original Screenplay (co-written by Marshall Brickman), Director and Actress (Diane Keaton). 35 years later, the simple story of Manhattan neurotic Alvy Singer (Allen) and his years-long romance with the delightfully ditzy Annie Hall (Keaton) still delights in ways that few romantic comedies ever come close to.

Told with a scattershot timeline (that somehow works) and through an endless number of short scenes that could stand on their own as insightful, amusing, and romantic skits, “Annie Hall” is a story told to us in the first-person by Alvy, a famous New York comedian. His story isn’t so much about his romance with Annie; it’s more about what he’s learned from the experience — not only about himself but human nature in general. And if you judge the film by its touching closing scene (as I do), you can count this among Allen’s rare optimistic offerings.

Keaton’s performance is a wonder to behold. When you compare the “la-dee-da” Annie Alvy first meets to the more worldly and composed Annie she eventually becomes (much of it due to Alvy pushing her in that direction), Keaton’s Oscar win is a no-brainer.  Right along with Alvy, we fall in love with Annie at first sight and, in the end, long for the innocence she loses. And this, of course, is also why the film is so bittersweet. With the best of intentions (mostly), Alvy helps Annie grow up, and she ends up outgrowing him.

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STEVEN SPIELBERG MIGHT PART RED SEA FOR WARNER BROS.

Which Spielberg will show up to direct this one? If it’s the “Munich” Spielberg, the moral illiterate who sees an equivalency between Islamists who target the innocent and Israelis who target those who target the innocent — no thanks.  If it’s the “Saving Private Ryan” Spielberg, the moral illiterate who told us saving a single man was  ”the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess” also known as World War II — no thanks.

RUSSELL BRAND WILL STAR IN ANOTHER MOVIE — A FAMILY COMEDY

After the remake of “Arthur” flopped rather spectacularly, Hollywood is proving once again they are just about tapped out of stars. Brand is THE most unlikable, charmless, and creepiest guy Hollywood has ever tried to turn into a leading man. And not creepy in a Karloff, Lugosi, Lorre kind of way — not creepy in a way that delights. You wouldn’t let him near your daughter. He should be doing extra stand-ins as Prisoner Number Five in insane asylums.  But here we go again.

EVANGELINE LILY CHATS ABOUT ‘THE HOBBIT’

If she manages her career well, Evangeline Lily has, in my humble opinion, what it takes to be a genuine star, a real box office attraction like Sandra Bullock. She’s undeniably talented, looks great on the big screen (see “Real Steel”), and her presence has the exact right qualities: strong, intelligent, sexy, womanly, approachable, and she carries herself with dignity.

She reminds me of Elizabeth Banks before she did the sleazy “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.”

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This week on HomeVideodrome, Hunter reviews Haywire, Shame, and Warrior, Jim has cedar fever, and we plow through a cornucopia of new releases.  Head on over to The Film Thugs to check it out.

Okay, so I was a little hard on Real Steel when it came out.  Revisiting it, I still stick by most of my criticisms, as I still find it irritating that the intelligence level of the Hugh Jackman and Dakota Goyo characters varies to insanely disparate levels whenever the script finds it convenient.  Goyo’s screechy kid-who-talks-and-thinks-like-an-adult is also excruciating (the fault of the writing and directing, not the child actor), and their robot Atom’s suggested sentience is nothing less than a ploy to attempt to make the audience care whenever he gets pounded on.  And no matter how nifty the CGI robot boxing is, nothing can compare to the dramatic potential of two actual humans fighting in the ring for family, country, or dignity.  But when it comes to the stock fanboy line of the greatness of “robots hitting each other,” “Real Steel” trumps Michael Bay’s cynical “Transformers” films on every level.

“Real Steel” has a heart that has hints of saccharine, but the film has a touch of middle Americana that is lacking from mainstream movies today, and despite its shortcomings, the father/son story does have a potent emotional core that pays off when it should.  “Transformers” has none of these things, as Bay is only interested in boys and their toys, said toys including cars and women.  “Real Steel” has higher aspirations that don’t have the stink of pseudo-family-friendly misogyny and vapid materialism.

Hugh Jackman is such a likable lead that he’s laughable when he’s attempting to be unlikable like he is during the first act of “Real Steel”, however Jackman’s potent presence alone keeps this from ever actually hurting the movie.  He’s entertaining to watch, even in the worst movies he’s been in, as he was one of the few things that made Gavin Hood’s dreadful “Wolverine” something one could feasibly sit through from start to finish. The humanity Jackman brings as an actor pumps blood into the heart of “Real Steel”, more so than the undercooked boy-and-his-robot sub-plot could hope to.  The father/son relationship a the movie’s center is marred by an obnoxious child performance, but it hits the necessary emotional beats that help one overlook the painful dialogue fed to the child actor, as well as the delivery seen as acceptable by the director.  Because it it hits those beats, it manages to mask most of its flaws, giving the movie an emotional core that is lacking in most blockbusters.

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In many ways “Friends with Benefits” is akin to a reboot of “No Strings Attached,” which came out just a few months ago, and that’s good news for conservative moviegoers.  Like “No Stings,” “FWB,” which stars the magnetic Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake, ultimately arrives at the conclusion that sexual relationships are apt to get very complicated very quickly and have the tendency to materialize into love.  Or tears.

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However, this rule doesn’t really apply when it comes to gay men.  A greater percentage of male/male relationships (compared to male/female or female/female) can be purely sexual without any “strings attached,” and, to the filmmakers’ credit, that nuance is not lost in “Friends with Benefits.”  Woody Harrelson, who is very funny as an over-the-top gay character, offers this wisdom.  But the ideas that “monogamy is against our nature” and casual sex comes with negligible emotional and physical baggage–particularly when there’s a woman in the equation–has been roundly rebuked in recent years and Hollywood romantic comedies deserve a lot of the credit.

There are even a few jokes that specifically target liberals: Kunis refers to hybrid cars and local/organic/sustainable food as “bullshit” on separate occasions and Harrelson says that “no one wants to fuck Obama” because his ears are too big.  For years romantic comedies have been a haven for conservative moviegoers because they tend to glorify monogamy as opposed to loveless sex.  But now they’re also subjecting liberals to the types of barbs right-of-center folk have endured for decades!? Could Hollywood finally be turning a corner?  With the advent of new media, conservatives finally have had a megaphone to complain about these digs that typically only go in one direction (ours).  Maybe it’s having an effect! (more…)

This year was actually a good year for movies, as I’ve written repeatedly.  The King’s Speech was great; so was Toy Story 3; Inception may go down as one of the most creative films of all time.  The Fighter was excellent as well. 

Then there were the overrated films.  Black Swan was atrociously awful, another Aronofsky masterpiece of self-aggrandizing bullcrap.  The Kids Are All Right was a TV movie masquerading as a prestige film because it was about lesbians.  True Grit was a remake.  

Which got me to thinking: what are the most overrated films of all time?  There are plenty of them, of course – we can all remember hearing from everybody about some terrific movie that defied the laws of physics by both sucking and blowing simultaneously.  For some of us, it was My Dinner With Andre.  For others, it was The Pianist.  For still others, it was anything with Diane Keaton other than Godfather I and II (me!).  As a movie addict, I can name dozens of overrated movies off the top of my head.  So I’ve decided to compile my top 20 overrated films of all time.  Remember, unless I say that I think they’re terrible, they’re overrated, not terrible (that point got me into trouble last time with my overrated directors list when people overlooked the distinction). 

Without further ado, here we go: 

20. Blade Runner:  I’ve watched it three times, hoping to understand the hubbub.  The concept is interesting, as all Philip Dick concepts are.  The pacing, however, is glacial, and the plot is amorphous.  I don’t hate this movie, I just don’t love it the way some film geeks do.  Minority Report is a better movie, and an underrated one (aside from copious amounts of snot). 

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The Oscar-nominated movies in recent years have been enough to make a grown man cry… Or worse. Consider “There Will Be Blood,” “No Country for Old Men” and “The Reader” as a sampling of the morbid films jockeying for Oscar glory. This year, add Oscar wannabes “The Road” and “Precious” to the list.

Newsweek scribe Ramin Setoodeh writes about the trend in the liberal magazine’s latest edition. Setoodeh bemoans the fact that some of the best films lately take a too sober view of society. On that we can agree.

Then, Setoodeh whips out his trusty Bush bashing cudgel and starts a whacking:

You can blame Hollywood’s doom and gloom on the Oscars, but I’m not going to. Instead, I think it’s George W. Bush’s fault. Most liberal directors felt restless under his presidency, and they pushed the envelope with over-the-top, operatic tragedies. (more…)

After more than thirty years Oscar® winning director Roman Polanski, the infamous child rapist and decades-long fugitive from justice, has been captured. He should be extradited back to California as soon as possible for sentencing. 

Some of Polanski’s early apologists and defenders are likely now entertaining discomforting second-thoughts about their hasty signing of the petition demanding his immediate release from captivity, as indeed some are also now furiously backpedaling in regret over their indiscretion of speaking out publicly on his behalf. 

It seems an appropriate time to review some origins and history underlying the modern psychological rationales currently attempting to dilute and evade Polanski’s morally deviant nihilism, and the cognitive dissonance (i.e., “it wasn’t ‘rape’ rape”) introjected by countercultural pseudo-intellectual sycophants. 

Its members’ values inculcation was, with purposeful destructiveness, initiated early last century by an all-too-often overlooked intellectual vanguard. So, in deconstructing the value of his sexual crimes, Polanski’s sophistic defenders were/are perhaps unwittingly acting out a reflexive cultural pre-conditioning, rather than logic and reason. This is hardly surprising, considering the players, yet the whys and wherefores are important, if only for historical perspective.  (more…)

We know – because we’ve been told – that love is many things. Unrequited love, however, is only a few things, mainly painful and baffling. But mostly baffling, because long after the pain ebbs the confusion remains: Why didn’t she love me?  In director Marc Webb’s feature debut, the clever and charming “500 Days of Summer,” that’s the question a despairing Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) asks as he looks back and tries to put the pieces of a broken relationship together in a way that might help to make sense of it all.

Like the fevered recollections of the newly heartsick, the plot leaps back and forth through the now-haunting highs and inexplicable lows of Tom’s 500 day relationship with Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a girl he met at the office, a girl who warned up front that she’s not wired for any kind of permanent relationship. Foolishly, instead of taking that personally, Tom might have made the mistake of taking her at her word and goes all in, sure he’ll be the first to make his way through Summer’s natural defense, the ethereal aloofness that both draws him and constantly keeps him off guard.   (more…)

How did they do it? 

Let’s face it, liberals didn’t take over our schools, the entire American education system by protesting. Sure, they made a lot of noise with their complaining, their picketing, but did that do the trick? Did that turn the tide? Did that transform what was once a learning environment that inspired inquisitiveness and curiosity, into a showplace for materialism – where we once taught respect for our men and women in uniform, rather than offering extra credit for flag burning – where teachers once encouraged independence, rather than reliance – where we once taught the lessons of history, rather than condemning it – where we once instilled responsibility, rather than simply handing out condoms?  How did they change what was once a morally conservative, patriotic institution, proud and respectful of our military, our flag, our constitution, our history and our culture into something that can only be described as Liberals gone wild?  (more…)