Saturday, November 8, 2008

The Woody Allen View

Yes this is the same Woody Allen, the creator of some of the finest wacky comedy classics of all time. In fact there is no other Woody Allen which we can together talk of. Recently I had a lucky chance to enjoy his masterwork ‘Annie Hall’. The movie, considered semi-biopic, consolidated his signature cinematic style. Woody Allen himself played the protagonist, a fixated and neurotic personality who is unable to derive gratification from an in general happy life. The very nature of the character is set in the opening scene where Alvy (Woody) breaks the ‘forth wall’ and talks to the audience directly about his neurotic psyche. He quotes two jokes which instantly set the chords. According to him they together best describe his vision of life (And perhaps mine too, till this point).

First One: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."
Final One: “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.”

Truly, such is life. Mostly: Intricately complex, raucously chaotic, scarily lonely, consistently demanding, terribly excruciating, awfully painful and at times acutely embarrassing. You may go ahead and add few more adjectives but yet you too regret how quickly it ends and are perhaps as fond of life as I am, cause somewhere between those entire derogatory annotations lie few heavenly moments which heels the soreness of the journey till that moment.

No matter how high one could have escalated age and experience wise yet they all can still count off the moments of exaltation and ecstasy that they would like to breathe again. But even then we are prepared to go through all the countless commotions of life for those few easily countable instants.

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