Deck The Hall

Rating: 8/10 (23 September 2016)

I enjoyed this as much if not more than any Woody Allen movie I've seen and I've seen most of them. The early titles, what we may call the First Wave were rightly viewed as a series of sketches with little or no unifying theme, reminding us of nothing so much as Oscar Wilde's lifelong desire to write a play with no plot just a string of epigrams. Then came the phase of more linear story lines which lost the one-liners followed by the current phase in which he no longer appears himself but employs actors to play 'Woody Allen' type characters. With Annie Hall the one-liners come thick and fast and 90 per cent of them are thrown away and punctuated by two sequences in which Diane Keaton sings in her own voice; the first time it's the old Gus Kahn standard It Had To Be You, which is interrupted by philistine customers in the club concerned and the second time it a sadly neglected number from 1945, Seems Like Old Times, which does, of course, double as a comment on the relationship of the two principals. In one sense The Way We Were explores very similar territory and would make an excellent double bill. Entertaining, Enjoyable, Bittersweet.