Don't listen to the naysayers, 'Alice' is Allen's finest light-hearted comedy. Combining elements of fantasy, romance, drama, and some of the best one-liners ever ("Bottoms and no top, I coulda called it") 'Alice' incorporates everything that makes Woody Allen films distinguishable and seamlessly melds them together to make a totally engaging, worthwhile film. Required Viewing in the Allen canon.
i found it to be too fanciful, and less witty than any of his films. the characters are totally uninteresting, and i hated the way farrow played alice.
two thumbs down
(although i did laugh very hard @ bottoms and no top, i coulda called it)
It's brilliant. All around brilliant. Not light-hearted at all. First saw it in my 20's. Just saw it again in my 30's. It's relevant. Brilliant. Fantastic on all levels.
I just saw this film and thought it was terrific. Easily Mia Farrow's best comedic performance. Interesting to see Allen's neuroses and guilt played out by a Catholic woman rather than a Jewish man - it would be a real contest to see which group does guilt better! ;-)
I was wondering about that line "bottom and no top" - what's the significance of that? Why is it funny?
Yeah, I appreciate Farrow and all, but I found her imitation of Woody a little annoying.
I think it's because Woody Allen imitations have become hack in my mind anyway, so seeing it at this point in my life feels like watching a bad comedian or Mad TV. I tried, but it's very difficult to get past that.
it's got a great cast, although davis, hurt, pretty much everyone is underused. it's funny, but slow. it's cute, but kind of precious. it's clever, but a little cloying. it's got the lamest music for an allen film - repetitive 'oriental' jazz tracks played over and over. and i think poor dr. yang is, unfortunately, though exotic, a somewhat offensive role... i mean, his english is good when allen needs a line in the script and bad when we are otherwise being treated to 'the foreign doctor'? please. for these reasons, it doesn't stand out as classic woody. on the other hand, it's watchable, and much better than a lot of the other crap out there... and the cinematography, as usual, is aesthetically pleasing. so it's still really good.
I agree about the doctor. Clearly the actor is a fluent English speaker, but they make it sound like he hardly knows the language.
On the other hand, I loved the "Oriental" jazz score and pretty much everything else about this film. It doesn't quite have the cohesiveness of Woody's finest, but it's a nice little fable with a great cast.
I didn't care for this as much as say the utterly sublime 'The Purple Rose of Cairo' because the magical realism conceit was less focused. In 'Cairo' Allen took a brilliant but relatively basic concept ("What if a character was able to come out of a movie into the real world?") and ran with it creating a masterpiece. With 'Alice', Allen explored some interesting themes but the story wasn't so tightly-executed because there was no one brilliant conceit. Instead, Alice at various time is able to become invisible, communicate with dead people or have men fall in love with her.
Watching this right after the tired, tedious and stilted Magic In Moonlight, I guess Alice deserves praise for being lively, eventful and fairly imaginative. However, it's also kind of unfocused and messy, as well as not nearly as funny as it strives to be. Also, the Manhattan millionaires' bitching about their lil problems & psychoanalyzing themselves gets really annoying and the babbling harpy Mia Farrow is typically insufferable. So, in all, it falls somewhere in the lower middle of Stiffy's filmography. It wasn't dull - but a "gem"? Let's not be ridiculous.