my feet haven't touched pavement since I reached Los Angeles

 

The movie Annie Hall is on Amazon Prime, you can stream it!

Full of surprises, laughs, and truths, this film has a lot of heart, story-wise, and visually it's got a plush, pithy magic that makes it sublimely relevant at any stage of the human experience.

There's a scene in the Los Angeles segment where it's a cocktail party -- bouncy, jazzy music, & people milling around smiling and talking -- movie-industry guys in conversation:

1st MAN

Well, you take a meeting with him, I'll take a meeting with you if you'll take a meeting with Freddy.

2nd MAN

I took a meeting with Freddy.  Freddy took a meeting with Charlie.  You take a meeting with him.

1st MAN

All the good meetings are taken.

3rd MAN

Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get money to  make it into a concept ... and later turn it into an idea.

___________________________________

Recently, watching episodes of -- well -- "Episodes" on Netflix, it occurred to me that someone could have watched that brief scene in Annie Hall and then said, hey let's build on that and make a whole television series out of people like this "in the business" who are constantly going crazy because of all the pressure and duplicitousness.

        I wanted to talk about Annie Hall here, but it's harder than I would have imagined.  Not easy to explain why the movie works so well and I could watch it over again any time, any number of times.

        The writer and director tells the story with a series of vignettes that just sort of say to the audience who these people are and who they are becoming, and the various yearnings and impulses that draw them together as a romantic couple, and split them apart.

        It isn't linear -- this happened, then this, then this....  Instead it's like photographs spread out on a table, not in any order.  A scene over here--an emotional connection over there...a little conflict or misunderstanding, as people evolve...

I would think it's the editing that makes this movie a quintessential expression of several cultural revolutions of the last century -- freedom of the individual, freedom of relationships, artistic freedom, and the necessity of being true to the self as well as to social and traditional obligations.

-30-