13 January 2012

WGA 101 BEST SCREENPLAY LIST RECAP

Here are 15 things I learned from watching and writing about these 101 movies:

1. There is a specific structure to great movies.
That structure is 4 acts, not 3. I will write a longer, more in-depth blog post about this in the next few weeks, but I think this was one of the most important revelations.

2. The films that last deal in life and death stakes.
In other words, the main character(s) must be in mortal danger for us to really care about what is happening to them. CHINATOWN wouldn't be nearly as good if Gittes didn't get his nose cut by a mysterious man in the second act. We wouldn't believe the cross-dressing in SOME LIKE IT HOT without the St. Valentine's Day massacre scene.

3. Story is change.
Look at the first scene and the last scene of the film: if the main character hasn't changed, it isn't a great movie. A good example of this is THE WIZARD OF OZ, where Dorothy is disgruntled, wants to get away, to see something else. She succeeds in that goal, and at the end, she is changed, she now knows she is home, and is happy about that. Or THE GODFATHER, where Michael Corleone goes from a returning war hero to the head of a Mafia family.

4. There must be a clean, clear, often tangible goal for the hero.
There are myriad examples of this: in THE MALTESE FALCON, it's the titular bird; in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, it's the titular ark. In other words, the goal is actually in the title of the movie! That's how important it is.

5. The best movies are thematically consistent.
They use a central idea as a nucleus for everything -- characters, plot, act breaks -- to revolve around. Coppola recently suggested boiling that idea down to one word:


What is the one thing to keep in mind when making a film?
When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.

The reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is make decisions. All day long: Do you want it to be long hair or short hair? Do you want a dress or pants? Do you want a beard or no beard? There are many times when you don’t know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.

I remember in “The Conversation,” they brought all these coats to me, and they said: Do you want him to look like a detective, Humphrey Bogart? Do you want him to look like a blah blah blah. I didn’t know, and said the theme is ‘privacy’ and chose the plastic coat you could see through. So knowing the theme helps you make a decision when you’re not sure which way to go.


I personally don't believe you need to be that stringent, but look at one of Coppola's own films on this list, APOCALYPSE NOW. To me, the central theme is "War is not hell, war is insanity." Every choice made in that film seems to follow that idea: the main goal itself, to journey to and kill their own colonel; the Colonel himself, who has gone insane; the scene with the Playboy bunnies are the soldiers who attack them; surfing during a raid. Coppola took a central idea and squeezed as much as he could out of it.

6. Great films are great characters.
A high-concept premise or a heavy plot does not a brilliant film make. We care about the characters first, then the situation they are put into. The examples are legendary, and, again, often titular: BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, the wry, often incompetent cowboys; THELMA & LOUISE, the bored housewives on the run; JERRY MAGUIRE, the sports agent with scruples; ROCKY, the down-and-out boxer who gets a shot at redemption; FORREST GUMP, the simpleton whose sweet nature made him a silent participant in much of the 20th century.

7. The audience wants to be manipulated.
That's what they're there for. The typical filmgoer watches a movie for entertainment, and most of the time that means they want to feel something. Examples abound: Who isn't relieved when we discover Doc Brown's bullet proof vest in BACK TO THE FUTURE? Who doesn't cringe in horror when they see Steve Buscemi's foot poking out of the wood chipper in FARGO? Who doesn't share Bill Murray's joy at finally waking up to February 3rd in GROUNDHOG'S DAY?

8. Dialogue is overrated.
It is icing on the cake, but is nothing without structure, motivation, character arcs. Consider PULP FICTION, rightly known for Tarantino's dazzling dialogue. Something almost all of his imitators in the 90's never understood was that he always uses those words always in service of something else: building tension, setting something up, aligning us with a character. The beginning scenes with Jules Winfield and Vincent Vega discussing Tony "Rocky Horror" do this expertly. First, the interchange is funny, making us like these guys. Secondly, it introduces us to their boss, making their upcoming killing less offensive to us. Thirdly, the fact that a man was thrown out of a window for a foot massage makes us understand that Vincent better behave himself at his upcoming date (and again, makes us like him, because even though he's a hitman, he's now the underdog). Finally, since it begins with a discussion outside of how they "should have shotguns" and how they are about to go up against a room full of dudes, it begins a suspense sequence with us wondering what will happen next.
All of which is to say, Tarantino isn't just trying to dazzle us with how clever he can be and how many pop-culture references he can jam in, he's crafting a fantastic story.

9. Suspense involves the audiences in the story.
A good example would be from The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, and his NOTORIOUS. Alicia (Bergman) and Devlin (Grant) are in Alicia's husband's wine cellar, investigating a mystery. We see her husband coming down the stairs, and audience, who is already invested in these characters (having seen them fall in love previously, including an iconic kiss), want them to not get caught, especially since they have just discovered uranium in one of the wine bottles. The audience asks: what will happen next? In a pay-off to a previous set-up (the iconic kiss), Grant kisses Bergman, feigning drunkeness. We are temporarily relieved.

10. Set-ups and pay-offs.
In ADAPTATION, this idea is turned on its head in a brilliant way. The story is about "Charlie Kaufman", a Hollywood screenwriter who wants to write movies about real life, real people, low stakes. His twin brother, "Donald", is also a writer, but writes the kind of high-concept, high-stakes genre shlock Charlie detests. At his wit's end adapting a book about flowers, Charlie does two things: he pitches a version of the flower book that basically amounts to an art film, and he goes to a Robert McKee screenwriting seminar. The third act is Charlie Kaufman, the writer of the movie, systematically paying off these two setups by taking McKee's advice and breaking all the rules he set for himself in the pitch: he says there will be no drugs, no car chases, no heroic deaths. Then, his brother dies, Chris Cooper runs them off the road, and Meryl Streep gets high.

11. Reversals/switcheroos.
Han Solo, in STAR WARS, is a rogue. That's why we like him. He cares only about money, about himself (his last name is "solo", get it?). He's only aligned with the resistance and against the Empire because the revolutionaries hired him first. So we are bummed, but not surprised, when he leaves before the final battle against the Death Star. But he's a mercenary with a heart, so when he comes back to the battle, guns blazing, it is a reversal that we buy, and a satisfying one.
Of course, bigger reversals, those that come at the end of a film and make us rethink the entire movie, are called twists. If done well, they make a great movie legendary, such as Bruce Willis being a ghost in THE SIXTH SENSE or Verbal being Keyser Soze in THE USUAL SUSPECTS.
Note: Reversals are closely tied to set-ups and pay-offs. To be an effective reversal, it needs to be set-up so that the pay-off is both unexpected and somehow also inevitable. Not easy.

12. Comedy is largely subjective.
This might explain the Academy Awards' general aversion towards comedy, because they don't know how to judge it. It also might explain my surprise at the inclusion of BROADCAST NEWS, MOONSTRUCK, and THE PRODUCERS on this list. All well-crafted, all funny, none of them much to my taste.

13. The moments of a movie that linger in memory are often fleeting.
I've often been surprised to find that a moment from an iconic movie that is now in the zeitgeist is played subtly or without fanfare in the actual film. The moment's reputation precedes it. One example would be the line "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" in GONE WITH THE WIND. It's a big moment in the film (and in Hollywood history, due to it including a curse word), but it is played like a small moment, and the narrative immediately continues to the next moment, does not linger.

14. Although I'm still not great at it, I'm much better at writing about film now than I was when I started.
Consider this analysis of THE GRAPES OF WRATH that spends half the time reviewing the screening at Facets, versus this more recent review of ON THE WATERFRONT, which discusses structure, motivation, and character, and also includes a clip from the film.

15. Sometimes I disagreed.
One thing about educating yourself on something is that you become accomplished enough or secure enough in what you've learned that you become independent in your opinions and skeptical of conventional wisdom. In other words, especially as I was approaching the finish of this list, I sometimes disagreed about whether a movie was well-written. Two recent examples were ALL ABOUT EVE, which I believe was not visual enough and would work much better as a play, and THE GODFATHER PART II, which I found to pale in comparison to the first film.

I realize that none of these are new lessons, and could be gleaned from reading screenwriting books, but there is something to be said for direct experience, for watching great movies and seeing how they work firsthand.

I should mention that many of these lessons were illuminated by the reading I did concurrent to watching the movies. Some of the things I read that furthered my learning about screenwriting:

* HITCH/TRUFFAUT

* MAMET'S BAMBI VS. GODZILLA, 3 USES OF THE KNIFE, Memo to writers of THE UNIT

* SAVE THE CAT

* TODD ALCOTT

* DAN HARMON'S CHANNEL 101 TUTORIALS




Here are my writings about the entire list, in numerical order:


  1. CASABLANCA

  2. THE GODFATHER

  3. CHINATOWN

  4. CITIZEN KANE

  5. ALL ABOUT EVE

  6. ANNIE HALL

  7. SUNSET BOULEVARD

  8. NETWORK

  9. SOME LIKE IT HOT

  10. THE GODFATHER PART II

  11. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID

  12. DR. STRANGELOVE

  13. THE GRADUATE

  14. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

  15. THE APARTMENT

  16. PULP FICTION

  17. TOOTSIE

  18. ON THE WATERFRONT

  19. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

  20. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

  21. NORTH BY NORTHWEST

  22. THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

  23. GONE WITH THE WIND

  24. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

  25. THE WIZARD OF OZ

  26. DOUBLE INDEMNITY

  27. GROUNDHOG DAY

  28. SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE

  29. SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS

  30. UNFORGIVEN

  31. HIS GIRL FRIDAY

  32. FARGO

  33. THE THIRD MAN

  34. SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

  35. THE USUAL SUSPECTS

  36. MIDNIGHT COWBOY

  37. THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

  38. AMERICAN BEAUTY

  39. THE STING

  40. WHEN HARRY MET SALLY

  41. GOODFELLAS

  42. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

  43. TAXI DRIVER

  44. THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

  45. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

  46. THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE

  47. THE MALTESE FALCON

  48. THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI

  49. SCHINDLER'S LIST

  50. THE SIXTH SENSE

  51. BROADCAST NEWS

  52. THE LADY EVE

  53. ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

  54. MANHATTAN

  55. APOCALYPSE NOW

  56. BACK TO THE FUTURE

  57. CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS

  58. ORDINARY PEOPLE

  59. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT

  60. L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

  61. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

  62. MOONSTRUCK

  63. JAWS

  64. TERMS OF ENDEARMENT

  65. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN

  66. JERRY MAGUIRE

  67. E.T.

  68. STAR WARS

  69. DOG DAY AFTERNOON

  70. THE AFRICAN QUEEN

  71. THE LION IN WINTER

  72. THELMA & LOUISE

  73. AMADEUS

  74. BEING JOHN MALKOVICH

  75. HIGH NOON

  76. RAGING BULL

  77. ADAPTATION

  78. ROCKY

  79. THE PRODUCERS

  80. WITNESS

  81. BEING THERE

  82. COOL HAND LUKE

  83. REAR WINDOW

  84. THE PRINCESS BRIDE

  85. THE GRAND ILLUSION

  86. HAROLD AND MAUDE

  87. 8 1/2

  88. FIELD OF DREAMS

  89. FORREST GUMP

  90. SIDEWAYS

  91. THE VERDICT

  92. PSYCHO

  93. DO THE RIGHT THING

  94. PATTON

  95. HANNAH AND HER SISTERS

  96. THE HUSTLER

  97. THE SEARCHERS

  98. THE GRAPES OF WRATH

  99. THE WILD BUNCH

  100. MEMENTO

  101. NOTORIOUS



12 January 2012

1. CASABLANCA




Story is change.

In this case, we have a character who changes throughout the course of the film for the better, for the greater good, against his basest instincts, and thus becomes noble.

"Everyone Comes To Rick's" was the original title, and while it's inelegant, it's correct: this movie revolves around Rick and his cafe. Rick, we are told by others, never has a drink with patrons, is attached to no woman, and is essentially a loner. Rick, by his own words, "sticks his neck out for no one." In this sense, Rick is a metaphor for America's isolationist policies.

But watch how things gradually change: from watching Rick brusquely escort a drunk one-night stand out of his cafe, to later passionately embracing Ilsa; from being business-like with his money throughout, to later helping a young woman cheat at roulette to buy passage out of Casablanca; from being resolutely apolitical, to helping a resistance fighter escape, risking his own life and giving up the woman he's pined for in the process.

There's another layer of change in this story, as well, the flashbacks to Paris where we see Rick and Ilsa in love. It is years prior, and they are carefree, the world is their oyster. That she leaves Rick with only a note at the train station is what changes him into the hardened, cyncical, jaded man he is at the start of the picture, and her reemergence in his life is what eventually spurns him to become a better man.

The changes continue at the end, where Rick has successfully risked everything to get Laszlo on the plane and sacrifices his own relationship with Ilsa for the greater good, for her to remain with Laszlo. To do all this required him to sell his cafe, so beyond changing internally, Rick must walk off into the uncertain future, a different and better man.

3. CHINATOWN




Lies. This movie is all about lies.

The story concerns LA private detective Jake Gittes, who takes a case from Evelyn Mulwray, who thinks her husband is cheating on her. Right away, we are caught in a lie, because after tailing Mr. Mulwray, a player in the city's water department, we discover that Mrs. Mulwray was a fake. The real Mrs. Mulwray reveals herself at Gittes' office and subsequently hires him to find out who impersonated her.

The lies continue, both small and big: Jake lies to access a police investigation at the reservoir, Mrs. Mulwray lies to Jake about why her husband and her father had a falling out, Jake and Mrs. Mulwray lie to get admitted at an old-folks home to ask questions.

And, of course, the biggest lie of the film is one of omission: "She's my sister. She's my daughter." Finally, Mrs. Mulwray comes out with the truth: "She's my sister and my daughter." And the ugly truth is revealed.

Here's the genius of designing a movie around a string of lies: you have no shortage of obstacles for the hero of the story, who must uncover lie after lie and sort the truth out from those. This is especially rich for a character like Jake Gittes, a smooth operator who always seems one step ahead of the game. It gives him a real challenge and tests his very nature, because as much as he discovers the truth behind one lie, that leads to another, and he's always playing catch-up.

Another great thing about designing a movie around lies is that you keep the audience engaged throughout, since they are aligned with the hero is trying to figure out what's real and what's a lie.

The title itself refers to a state of mind where you think you know what's going on, but you really don't. Where you dig deeper into something, and the more you discover, the more you realize you have barely scratched the surface. A big way to be put into this state of mind is through lies, and everyone in the film experiences it: Jake in various ways throughout with his investigation; Evelyn, who knows secrets about her husband and father but doesn't know what got the former killed or the extent of the power-grab by the latter; Escobar, lost at sea in his police work; the Cross daughter, who has no idea of her true identity but must know something that she can't quite articulate is dead wrong.

11 January 2012

My movie year 2011

Here are all the movies -- plus a few other things -- that I watched in 2011:


  1. Get Him to the Greek

  2. The Hurt Locker

  3. The Usual Suspects

  4. True Grit -- 2010

  5. Four Lions

  6. The Fighter

  7. The Road

  8. Guy And Madeline on a Park Bench

  9. Night Catches Us

  10. Marwencol

  11. Somewhere

  12. Boogie Nights

  13. Say When -- rough cut

  14. Blue Valentine

  15. Smokey and the Bandit

  16. The Third Man

  17. The King's Speech

  18. The Leopard

  19. Jesus Camp

  20. L'Atalante

  21. After Last Season

  22. Harry Potter and the blah blah blah

  23. The Godfather

  24. And Everything is Going Fine

  25. Starship Troopers

  26. Block of shorts -- Texas shorts

  27. Wuss

  28. The Innkeepers

  29. The Catechism Cataclysm

  30. Futurestates -- dystopian shorts

  31. Dragonslayer

  32. Silver Bullets

  33. Septien

  34. Bellflower

  35. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

  36. Convento

  37. No Matter What

  38. Sound of My Voice

  39. Fambul Tok

  40. Freakonomics

  41. The Big Lebowski

  42. Demolition Man

  43. 4192

  44. Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World

  45. Surrogate Valentine

  46. Your Highness

  47. His Girl Friday

  48. Rear Window

  49. Unforgiven

  50. Restrepo

  51. The Terminator

  52. Jurassic Park

  53. Days of Thunder

  54. Melvin and Howard

  55. Philadelphia

  56. Uncle Kent

  57. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

  58. Cave of Forgotten Dreams

  59. Shakespeare in Love

  60. The Beaver Trilogy

  61. Double Indemnity

  62. There Will Be Blood

  63. Bridesmaids

  64. The Wizard of Oz

  65. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

  66. The Exodus of Charlie Wright

  67. 13 Assassins

  68. The Tree of Life

  69. I Love You, Man

  70. Burn After Reading

  71. Jackass

  72. Vertigo

  73. Hall Pass

  74. Risky Business

  75. March of the Penguins

  76. Super 8

  77. Monster's Inc.

  78. The 40-Year-Old Virgin

  79. The Break-Up

  80. Beginners

  81. Double Team

  82. Due Date

  83. The Last Picture Show

  84. Swingers

  85. Page One

  86. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

  87. Ferris Bueller's Day Off

  88. Harry Potter and the blah blah blah Part 2

  89. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

  90. Incredibly Small

  91. The Incredibles

  92. Ratatouille

  93. Friends With Benefits

  94. Incredibly Small

  95. Easy A

  96. Gone With the Wind

  97. Crazy, Stupid, Love

  98. Goodfellas

  99. The Shawshank Redemption

  100. Tabloid

  101. Finding Nemo

  102. Wall-E

  103. North By Northwest

  104. Attack the Block

  105. Sixteen Candles

  106. To Kill A Mockingbird

  107. Another Earth

  108. Stop Making Sense

  109. Wattstax

  110. Footloose - 2011

  111. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

  112. The Rise of the Planet of the Apes

  113. Incredibly Small

  114. Fingerman: Dr. London and the Triangle Force

  115. On the Waterfront

  116. Tootsie

  117. Contagion

  118. Act Naturally

  119. Drive

  120. Until the Light Takes Us

  121. Soul Power

  122. Pulp Fiction

  123. Bronson

  124. Valhalla Rising

  125. Bridesmaids

  126. Random shorts -- Jason Reitman, Spike Jonze, David Lynch, more

  127. The Graduate

  128. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

  129. Autoerotic

  130. 50/50

  131. One Too Many Mornings

  132. The Asphalt Jungle

  133. General Orders No. 9

  134. The Interrupters

  135. Margaret

  136. Moneyball

  137. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

  138. The Ides of March

  139. Take Shelter

  140. Meet the Parents

  141. Beetlejuice

  142. American Pimp

  143. Halloween

  144. Tchoupitoulas -- rough cut

  145. Saturday Morning Massacre -- rough cut

  146. Melancholia

  147. The Godfather Part II

  148. Jurassic Park

  149. Network

  150. Saturday Morning Massacre -- rough cut

  151. A Mighty Wind

  152. The Muppets -- 2011

  153. The Descendants

  154. Panic Room

  155. Patrice O'Neal -- Elephant in the Room

  156. Martha Marcy May Marlene

  157. Shame

  158. Sunset Boulevard

  159. All About Eve

  160. The Skin I Live In

  161. Richard Pryor -- Live on the Sunset Strip

  162. Louis CK -- Live at the Beacon Theatre

  163. Richard Pryor -- Live in Concert

  164. Kenneth Anger shorts

  165. Raiders of the Lost Ark

  166. Raiders of the Lost Ark -- The Adaptation

  167. Elf

  168. Young Adult

  169. A Christmas Story

  170. Chinatown

  171. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- 2011

  172. Hugo

  173. Citizen Kane

  174. Casablanca

  175. * Cincinnati to New Orleans By Water -- web series (not technically a movie, but still one of the best things I watched this year.)



I also watched pretty much every episode of FRIENDS, JUSTIFIED, and THE OFFICE.

4. CITIZEN KANE




It's about the search for love.

Kane is sent off from his mother, "for his own good", to live with a rich guardian. He runs a newspaper, marries the President's niece. We see a decade of that marriage over the breakfast table. He meets his mistress, a would-be singer. He runs for governor. He builds an opera house to give his lady a place to perform. He buys art, surrounds himself with possessions. He throws lavish parties.

In all that he does, he is trying to fill the hole that was his initial rejection from his mother, who sent him away when he was young. With his newspaper business and run for office, he is looking for love from the public. With his marriages and his relationship with his best friend Jed, he is looking for love privately. And finally, with his building of Xanadu, his estate, he is looking for love materially. He never finds it.

One of the smart things about the movie is that it is structured like a detective movie. One of the even smarter things is that the objective of that quest: "Figure out what his final word, 'Rosebud", means" is actually fulfilled, and yet, it explains nothing.

Another reason this movie has endured is that it is uniquely American: it is about a Great Man who goes from rags-to-riches like Horatio Algiers, defying class conventions. The Great Man is a public man, but ultimately he is unknowable, a jigsaw puzzle, complex.

Like ALL ABOUT EVE, we get voiceover and perspective from multiple characters. By contrast, however, each of these stories constitutes a complete 3-act mini-structure inside the larger narrative. Accordingly, the narrative shifts around in time, non-linearly. This play with time was innovative in its day, and still holds up.

5. ALL ABOUT EVE




This should have been a play.

It is really simple: a movie must be primarily visual. This film relies too much on dialogue to move the story along, together with pervasive voiceover (which, while innovative -- more on that later -- is still a crutch).

A good example is directly after the midpoint, when Margot (played by Bette Davis), a star in the theatre, arrives to the table reading of a new play late. Her assistant, the titular Eve, read in lieu of her and killed. And now the writing is on the wall: her suspicions about Eve trying to replace her are seemingly confirmed, and she continues to feel over-the-hill, old, expendable.

The problem is that we get this information through back and forth dialogue between Margot and DeWitt in the theatre lobby. It is a break of the age-old writer's maxim: Show, Don't Tell.

What if, instead of a scene of dialogue, Bette Davis comes in late and before, she comes through the door, hears the dialogue being read by Eve and stops short. What if she peeks through the door and watches Eve transformed, acting her ass off. She watches the admiring faces of the others at the table as this assistant is revealed to them as a new star. We see Davis watch them explode into applause at the end of Eve's reading, and we see Davis' face as she realizes her time is up. And then we see her wipe her tears away and compose herself, put her public mask back on as she barges through the door with panache to try to take the focus off Eve, trying to regain control of the room and, thereby, her future as a viable actress.

The above would be visual, would rely more on acting with the body than the mouth, and, I believe, would engage the audience better by letting them fill in the blanks.

That said, there's quite a few things to recommend the film:

* For a movie that leans so heavily on dialogue, it provides some great lines:
"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
"Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men."
"Nice speech, Eve. But I wouldn't worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be."
"Don't cry. Just score it as an incomplete forward pass. "
"When you're a secretary in a brewery, it's pretty hard to make-believe you're anything else. Everything is beer."

* It's an archtypical story, an inside baseball tale about a simultaneous rise and fall, about ambition and fear of failure. It has been copied often because the tale of a young climber and an old timer barely hanging on a nerve in the zeitgeist.

* The innovative use of voiceover. The VO switches between characters throughout the film to various characters as needed. I'm not sure if that had been done before this film, but I don't think it has ever been done as effectively.

So, it isn't that the movie is poorly written. The problem with ALL ABOUT EVE is that it would be far better as a play than as a movie.

6. ANNIE HALL





Three things come to mind when thinking about ANNIE HALL:

1) The unity of theme in the movie.

The working title of the film was ANHEDONIA, the inability to experience pleasure. Everything in this film, from the overall arc of the two main characters down to individual lines. Allen's character is miserable, and spends his romantic relationships trying to fill that hole. He never succeeds, but comes to terms with it. Annie Hall herself is similarly neurotic, but she is able to improve and begin to come to terms with herself and experience pleasure. Her increasing comfort with herself and self-actualization becomes serious conflict with Alvy. Finally, Allen is smart to create an opposite character as his best friend. Rob is Alvy's contrast, living only for pleasure, and doing so without regret.

2) The use of set-ups and pay-offs.

Set-ups and pay-offs are some of the most important and underrated script techniques. Allen uses this beautifully, most notably in the two lobster cooking scenes. In the first, Allen and Annie are at the beach house, having a great time bonding while putting live lobsters in pots. Later, when Allen is with a new woman, he tries to recreate this sense of fun, but the outcome is decidedly different and results in a disaster.
Another example, less poignant and more comedic, is Christopher Walken revealing his fantasy about crashing a car on purpose. We then cut to Allen in the car with Walken driving, Allen white knuckled. You can see the sequence below in its entirety:



3) The playfulness of the film's bending of film grammar.

Like PULP FICTION, this film bends the language of film in a way that conveys sheer joy from the filmmaker. The ways are myriad:

* Non-linear structure, cutting between Alvy's different relationships, starting in the middle of Alvy and Annie's relationship and doubling back.
* Breaking the fourth wall, Allen addressing the audience directly as a framing technique at the head and tail of the film.
* Use of fantasy, when Allen brings in Marshall McLuhen to argue a point for him, or when Annie floats out of her body to look for art supplies, or incorporating an animated sequence ripping off SNOW WHITE.
* Split-screens, to compare and contrast Alvy's rambunctious family with Annie's staid family.

I have a lot of problems with Woody Allen's work, but there's no doubt that this movie is a masterpiece.