1975 - Love and Death

I watched this movie last year, and it is very good - it's funny. Allen is Boris Grushenko, a soldier in czarist Russia (?) who is involved in a plot to kill Napoleon. By itself, the premise is fun. But, you have to know that you have again the marvelous Diane Keaton as Sonja and that's the thing: She makes everything better, because she can play the same kind of jokes that Allen cracks and they have the most amazing chemistry together. 

And one of the funny aspects is the "pseudo-psychological" dialogues they conduct brilliantly. Take a look at this example:

Sonja: To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.

If you compare this with other movies about those difficult themes such as death like The Seventh Seal, for example, then you'll discover that Allen has a more light view of it, bright. He is dealing with something very serious and tense - and the movie is fun, I know, but it is meaningful. I understood that you simply can't take everything so seriously, even you - or death itself.

1973 - Sleeper

I feel kind of lazy posting this because I have been watching too many movies and, for example, regarding Woody Allen, I watched 12 in a row and I felt completely not in right mood to sit here and to write everything I felt while watching them - although my view of Allen and all of his movies have changed a lot.

And I think it started right back when I watched this one, Sleeper, which is really fun and intelligent, I mean, it really is. You see, the thing is that Allen plays one of those idiots he is always playing (indulgent, dull, mean, lazy, etc.), and now he is at the verge of a revolution in a kind of sci-fi comedy-drama with the help of marvelous almost goddess Diane Keaton - whom I have only really discovered here, when she played Marlon Brando in A Streetcar named desire - really.

The fun part is that, similarly like other movies, Woody Allen can distort reality and the way people react towards framed responses, but, moreover, he can put almost anything in his movie and it works. I'm not getting into a lot of details here, I'm not that good to talk about comedy movies - that's for sure - but this is a true gem.

And if you want to laugh, here's the scene where Allen is trying to remember his past by playing Blanche from Tennessee Williams' play Streetcar.