it's better than I remembered.

Rating: 10/10 (11 March 2001)

(Re-review 2011): I was telling my wife after seeing the movie again, for what I'm sure is only about the 20 or 30th time (and stuff just keeps getting funnier every time I see it), that while it is great, it's great in a very loose, sketchy-comedy kind of way. It has a story, and it's never hard to follow even as it jumps around (it even has, as we say in 'screenwriter-lingo', good 'plants' and 'pay-offs' with certain mentions of stuff), but it's not really about that. I have to figure it's cause Allen originally had a *three-hour* movie on his hands, that was Annie Hall and Manhattan Murder Mystery - or what would become of that.
Oddly enough, I have to think that Allen canned the Manhattan Murder Mystery footage due to it, you know, not working, and then he and his fantastic editor Ralph Rosenblum made the film we have today out of all the sweet and funny relationship/cultural-awareness jokes that were in the story anyway. I'd be curious to see that footage though; in a way, when Allen finally made Manhattan Murder Mystery, he probably didn't change what he and Marshall Brickman originally wrote, he likely just grafted that script and then re-shot it (in some part as he was creatively pre-occupied at the time due to the Mia Farrow divorce going down). So, ultimately, Manhattan Murder Mystery is like his The Man Who Knew Too Much, a remake of his own material. But I digress.
It's Woody Allen. It's Diane Keaton. It's Paul Simon in disco gear talking about chilling with 'Jack and Angelica'. It's Jeff Goldblum forgetting his mantra. It's Christopher (bleep) Walken on vacation from planet Wiseau. And it's Marshall MacLughan talking about fallacies and so on.
Boy, if life were only like this.