Had an archetypal New York experience today - went to see Woody Allen's classic "Manhattan" (1979) in a new print at the Film Forum with old friends K and F. I'd only seen it once before, the eve of my prelims at Worcester in 1985. At that point I was close in age to 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway); now I'm a year from the age of Isaac (Woody Allen)! The film didn't exhilarate me as I'd expected - it seemed long and the characters less interesting than we were supposed to think. But - K and F convinced me - this may be because these characters have become such types of New Yorker existence: some people may be like that already, and others come to New York to become that way!Instead I marveled at the cinematography, brilliant use of black and white with the action moving from one edge of the screen to another in ever striking ways. Almost every scene is like the famous one above. The movie poster and its most famous still is cut from the middle of the right half, but the sublimity of the scene comes from the rest.
