Day Twenty-Two, Part Two: Love and Death

When I said, after watching Mighty Aphrodite, that it was strange to watch a Woody Allen movie I didn't like, that wasn't entirely true. Although I've almost uniformly loved his post-Annie Hall movies, full of the witty dialogue and neurotic New Yorkers I love and have grown to expect in his films, I haven't been particularly impressed with his early stuff, which is a lot more slapsticky and silly, and not very rooted in real life. Maybe that's why I didn't like Mighty Aphrodite as much, because its gimmicks and corny humor made it more like those earlier comedies. But I really enjoyed Love and Death, cracking up several times, despite the fact that it was a goofy anachronistic comedy based on Russian novels like War and Peace. Maybe it's just that I'm vaguely familiar with the source material (well, I've read the first hundred or so pages of both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, anyway). Maybe I just couldn't resist the idea of The Princess Bride starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, which is how I might describe this movie if pressed.

Love and Death isn't mentioned as often as Sleeper or Bananas in discussions of Allen's early movies, even though the Netflix description claims it's his personal favorite of all his films. The only place I'd heard of it before finding it on Netflix was from my magazine writing professor last semester. He laughingly recounted the scene in which Woody Allen, as a soldier about to go off to war, responds to a seconds-long anti-STD play put on for the soldiers with this typically deadpan and absurd review: "The part of the doctor was played with gusto and verve and the girl had a delightful cameo role. A puckish satire of contemporary mores. A droll spoof aimed more at the heart than the head." (That did turn out to be a very funny scene.) I might not have remembered the professor's anecdote--he referenced a lot of relatively obscure comedic books and movies, and told lots of personal stories--except for the fact that I had class with my friend Cody, who likes to make fun of my devotion to Woody Allen. I guess he's mostly known today for things that have nothing to do with his ridiculously wonderful movies, like his current legal battle with American Apparel for their use of a still from Annie Hall on a billboard. Well, at least I'm not the only person at the University of Minnesota who recognizes his genius--even if the only other one I've met is an over-50 professor.