I stood over a young woman on the train last night. She had a narrow face and it looked like she was sucking in her cheeks. An open book rested on top of a big leather bag that was on her lap (the subject of what women put in their bags, and how often they change their bags merits its own discussion). Soon, I sat in a seat across from her. She was wearing black boots, and a long skirt and her hips were wide though I couldn’t make out her figure from the way she was sitting. I tried to figure out how a girl with a big body could have such a slender face.

As the train pulled into the 125th station, she closed her book and looked up. I saw that she was reading Diane Keaton’s new memoir.  That was when I noticed that her blazer and the big, decorated scarf that was wrapped around her neck. You know how some people look like their dogs? She looked like her book, a real Annie Hall. As I wished that I could take a picture of her, she looked at me. I raised my eyebrow and she titled her head, smiled, and walked off the train.

[Poster by Mike Oncley]

Pauline Kael on Woody’s first trip into heaviosity, Interiors:

The people in Woody Allen’s Interiors are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman.

Interiors looks so much like a masterpiece, and has such a super-banal metaphysical theme (death versus life) that it’s easy to see why many regard it as a masterpiece: it’s deep on the surface. Interiors has moviemaking fever, all right, but in a screwed-up form — which is possibly what the movie is all about.

The movie is so unfunny it’s not even funny. Actually, it’s so unfunny that it’s funny, which is funny because the last thing it wants to be is funny.