What the Manolo Is…

Manolo says, it is Tuesday, time to see what the Manolo is…

Reading…

Listening to…

Watching…

The Manolo had not seen the
Annie Hall movie in many years, and after viewing it two nights ago, is happy to report that it has held up remarkably well, indeed, most of the jokes still seemed fresh, and the topic, love found and then lost, is as timely and as bittersweet as it has ever been. It is truly the lovely, funny movie.

This is not to say that everything in the movie has survived, or that the film is as completely trenchant as it was in 1977. For the example, the era of Freudian analysis has passed (as perhaps even the era of Freud himself). Likewise, also gone is the era of intelligent art cinema, when we would eagerly stand in lines to see the latest Ingemar Bergman film.

And this leads the Manolo to the next natural conclusion (reached over lunch yesterday with the Manolo’s good friend Izzy) that high-minded intellectual and philosophical discourse, which is both mocked and celebrated in Annie Hall, has mostly vanished from the popular culture.

For better or worse, no one could produce the movie that makes comedic reference to Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and Jacques Choron’s Death and Western Thought, and expect to be understood in any meaningful way.