I tried to watch A Man Called Otto. After 30 minutes I found myself wishing the rope held.
I’m currently binge-watching the early Woody Allen films, of which I’ve long been a fan. They were consistently very funny, whereas when he branched off into the more “serious” stuff, the quality was uneven – a few really great movies (though not always to everyone’s taste) and some misses.
Anyway, I’m mostly sticking to the early stuff for this binge. So far, Bananas (1971), Take the Money and Run (1969), and Sleeper (1973).
Bananas features Allen visiting a small Latin American dictatorship and getting involved with the dictator (Ricardo Montalban). Very funny, yet not quite as good as I thought I remembered it.
Take the Money and Run is just classic early Allen, where he plays an aspiring but totally inept crook. The narration is deadpan mock serious, with frequent cuts to an interview with his bickering parents who, because they’re ashamed of their son, disguise themselves by wearing novelty glasses with a fake nose and mustache attached. So far the best of the three.
In Sleeper, Allen wakes up 200 years in the future after being cryogenically frozen, to a world full of gadgets and robots but the US is a dystopian dictatorship. Probably Allen’s first film featuring Diane Keaton. Full of slapstick gags and very funny.
And many more to come.
For what it’s worth, Play It Again, Sam is my favorite movie of all time.
By an odd coincidence, having finished the three I mentioned, I’m just about to start Play It Again, Sam next! 
After that, Love and Death.
Which is a bit of an anomaly…he wrote it and stars (as usual) but didn’t direct.
Carlos Montalbán, Ricardo’s brother.
I’ve always enjoyed his early comedies, the ones you mentioned. “Sleeper” is especially hilarious. Two of his 80s movies I particularly enjoy are “Radio Days” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” Allen doesn’t appear in either one, though he narrates “Radio Days.” Oh, and how can I forget “Zelig.”
The Dope fights ignorance once again! Carlos doesn’t look like Ricardo, but I saw “Montalban” in the credits and assumed Ricardo, and that the appearance was the makeup. Also didn’t notice that Play It Again, Sam wasn’t directed by Allen. Thank you for the corrections!
My binge lineup for tonight and beyond:
Play It Again, Sam
Love and Death
Broadway Danny Rose
Zelig
The Babadook
Highly recommended.
Still excellent my second time seeing it. If you haven’t had a chance to see it, do so. It’s a horror movie with no jump scares. A really excellent movie.
Before Play It Again, Sam, Allen did something in six movies:
What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
Take the Money and Run
Bananas
What’s New Pussycat?
Casino Royale
Don’t Drink the Water
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex was released several months after Play It Again, Sam.
What’s Up Tiger Lily? was actually a Japanese film that Allen overdubbed with English-language dialogue.
Take the Money and Run and Bananas were sort of sloppy collections of jokes.
What’s New Pussycat, Casino Royale, and Don’t Drink the Water weren’t directed by Allen either.
Yes, he didn’t direct Play It Again, Sam. It had a tighter structure than anything he had done before. Instead, Herbert Ross (an experienced director at that point) was hired to direct it. The rights to turn it from a play (that he wrote) to a film were sold without his decision to do so before he could do anything about it. It was the point that he turned from being a writer of television comedy sketches, a stand-up comedian, and a playwright into being a filmmaker.
If by that you mean that those movies had no pretensions of any kind of serious story line underpinning the comedy, that’s true of most of Allen’s early work, and it’s also true of many other classic and finely crafted comedies – Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Airplane! come to mind. I wouldn’t apply a derogatory adjective like “sloppy” to any of them. A comedy is a failure only if it isn’t funny, and most of Allen’s early work is very, very funny.
Allen also neither wrote nor directed The Front, a dramatic movie about the Blacklist (and whjich was written and starred blacklisted actors). He may not have directed Play it Again Sam, but he wrote the screenplay, as well as the Broadway play it was an adaptation of (and which he also starred in). So if the movie appears to have a tighter structure, that’s still Woody Allen’s doing. But you can definitely see that another hand directed it.
Suzume
Highly recommended.
I await Hayao Miyazaki’s next movie, but have now seen Makoto Shinkai’s latest and it is excellent. I think, though this is not the majority viewpoint, that Suzume is the best movie I have seen from him. I think most people love Your Name, which is very good, but this was the best thing he’s released in my opinion.
If you are looking for a great animated movie, you can not go wrong here. I think Across the Spider-verse is still the best animated movie of the year, but Suzume was gripping all the way through.
I never knew a chair could be so cute! I want one!
I would apply “sloppy” to them. Yes, they’re very, very funny. They just don’t have the tight structure that Allen’s later films have. Those two films were characteristic of someone who wrote for some of the best sketch comedy television shows of the 1950s. The other writers for those shows recognized how good he was at that. He then became a good stand-up comic. Meanwhile, he watched a lot of movies and learned how to structure them. He then wrote the play version of Play It Again, Sam and starred in it. He arranged to have a movie made of Play It Again, Sam. Unfortunately, the financiers of it decided that while he could star in it and write the screenplay, he couldn’t direct it. So they hired Herbert Ross to direct it. Perhaps he learned some things about how a film should be structured from Ross. In any case, it was a turning point for Allen.
I disagree. If you’ve read or seen the play, you can see that the play itself is well-structured, and that was long before Ross’ involvement. In any event, the play of Play it Again Sam is better constructed than his earlier play Don’t Drink the Water.
(Don’t Drink the Water was turned into an awful 1969 movie starring Jackie Gleason. Allen had no hand in it, and reportedly hated the film. He himself starred in a version made for TV in 1994 that I was unaware of and haven’t seen. But that one, too, despite being faithful to the play and starring Allen, got rotten reviews. )
Yes, it is, but well-structured for a play doesn’t necessarily mean well-structured for a movie.
You’re grasping at straws. “well structured” here means a story well and cohesively told, without the scattershot , almost “blackout” approach to humor used in Allen’s earlier work. That’s true regardless of whether it’s a stage play or movie.
And Allen clearly didn’t learn to do that from Ross if it’s present in the stage play.
The little fantasy sequence where Diane Keaton’s husband says he’s leaving her for an Eskimo (a term no longer used, btw) ending with “Oh, I can be reached at FRozentundra 7-5309” just kills me, for some reason.
Just looking at the chronology, it’s hard to see how you would think that. Prior to Play It Again, Sam, Allen had written and directed two major films (not counting Tiger Lily, which is an oddball thing that, frankly, hasn’t aged well) namely Bananas and Take the Money and Run. Both are very good but IMHO Take the Money is sheer genius. Nothing “sloppy” about it. And then well after Sam, Allen wrote and directed Sleeper and Love and Death, which have exactly the same lighthearted farcical qualities so beloved in Allen’s early work.
It wasn’t until five years later, with Annie Hall (1977), that by Allen’s own account and general consensus there was a major turning point in his filmmaking. There now tended to be more serious story lines blended with comedy, with comedy sometimes taking a back seat and occasionally disappearing altogether, and although Allen continued to turn out films at a prolific rate, the quality was uneven, IMHO. In the middle of this, Zelig marked a brief return to the old style.
Which is why I picked the movies I did for my binge watch – I wanted classic Woody Allen comedy.
the early, funny ones.