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Bananas

Bananas

List Price: $14.95
Your Price: $13.46
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great from a Thirteen-Year-Old
Review: It thought this movie was great. I thought the pornography in beginning was a little weird for a PG movie but it was a good movie all the same.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: EXCELLENT SCREWBALL COMEDY
Review: LOVED THE SCENE WITH THE TRANSLATOR BY THE PLANE. I STRIKE LAUGHING THINKING ABOUT IT ON THE SUBWAY SOMETIMES, PEOPLE START LOOKING AT ME WEIRD, WHICH JUST COMPOUNDS THE LAUGHER FOR ME.

YEA BABY YEA!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Woody's Best
Review: Many say Annie Hall is Woody Allens best, but I've got to disagree. I've watched this movie countless times and can't stop laughing for more than a minute the whole time through. I fall asleep watching Annie Hall sometimes, It's pretty overrated. Banana's is one of the funniest movies of all time next to Take the Money and Run and What's Up Tiger Lily. I guess I like his old stuff the best. It's a great example of how far a guy will go for love? Nope, to get laid. It's laughs from begining to end. You'll hate Bananas if you hate Woody Allen. You'll love it if you love him.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Inspired insanity from Woody's early days......
Review: Mixing heavy doses of slapstick, parody, and verbal wit, this film will not convert non-fans, but it will please Woodyphiles. The plot, such as it is, involves a satire of Castro's Cuba and also manages to mock the pseudo-intellectualism of the young Left. Great jokes, memorable lines, and film allusions galore (including a classic one from "Battleship Potemkin"). There's no need to apply logic here; it's a mess, but its zaniness will leave a lasting impression.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Possibly the funniest film yet made
Review: Most comic films sag somewhere. But at no point in BANANAS do you feel the writer has run out of inspiration. There are some fantastic sequences: for instance, from the moment Allen tries to covertly buy a copy of 'Orgasm' magazine to the scene on the subway where the doors have opened again to allow Sly Stone and his thug friend back on to the train. Sheer brilliance.

The zany trilogy of BANANAS, SLEEPER and LOVE & DEATH should probably all be considered together. They all have wonderful moments, and they all have a Let's-assassinate-the-President plot which Allen uses to hang his finest gags and sketches from. In BANANAS, assassinating the President is central to the story; in the other two movies, it's more of a convenience, perhaps because Allen couldn't think of any other way to craft a plot climax.

I have an awful lot of affection for this film. For me, it's up there with KIND HEARTS & CORONETS and AIRPLANE! as the funniest film ever made. Very, very Seventies, but it was a great decade.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fielding, from the Latin, meaning strong or with strength
Review: Others have given some of the details, but let me just add another nod for this classic. It is probably Woody's best film in spite of its 60s-ish raggedness. So many great lines, so many perfectly executed comedic scenes, brilliant, wacky, and terrific (and sharp) political satire to boot. To many contemporary viewers this movie will seem a bit dated, but shame on them. This is marvelous slapstick with a playfully intellectual edginess. It's interesting that today with our dulled and overloaded minds our comedies are so humorless. We find it hard to understand how slapstick and intellectuality go hand in hand. But praise the Lord and pass the absurd, because this low budget flick is one of the greatest comedic classics of all time--right up there with A Night At the Opera, maybe even above it.

Love and Death is hilarious and at least as heady, but this movie is a blast from start to finish. But if you don't get it, don't beat yourself about the face and head over it, just go out and rent one of those Saturday Night Live Star Turned Actor of The Week Adolescent Yuk Fests that Hollywood is cranking out at an alarming rate for your viewing pleasure and the filling of their oh so needy pockets.

But, if the codename Sapphire means something to you and you believe the greatest crimes are the crimes against human dignity then check this one out. And the DVD is a great improvement over some of the tapes I've seen. For the first time I noticed that, during Fielding's tense and unpleasantly silent dinner with Vargas, Woody is wearing a suit with all the tailor's chalk marks still visible on it.

I can only hope that someday Miss America will testify as a character witness against me. "I believe Mr. Macabre is a traitor to our country because his views are different from those of the President and others of his kind. Differences of opinion should be tolerated, but not if they're too different. That makes him a subversive mother."

It's over, it's all over, the review has been consummated.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Thou Shalt Not Underestimate Woody Allen
Review: The (Main) Cast: Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Carlos Montalban Howard Cosell

The Rating: PG-13 (For drug use, crude humor, and pin-up nudity)

The Outline: Fielding Mellish (Allen) is an average New Yorker who becomes involved in a South American revolution after the assassination of a president of the country of San Marcos.

The Extreaminizer's Opinion: Hysterical, neurotic follow-up to Woody's other creation, Virgil Stackwell, in Take the Money and Run. Hysterical in its diner scene, where the orders just overflow with green paper bags (i.e. 300 grilled cheese sandwiches, 1,000 BLT's, 500 Coke's, 1,000 7-Ups, etc.), and its Fidel Castro parody, and a sex scene finale played more like a boxing match.

The Bottom Line: Classic Woody Allen, similar to his futuristic Sleeper. 95% out of 100%, 5% deducted because it could have used 5 extra minutes to its short 82-minute run.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: HONEYMOON LIKE A BOXING MATCH
Review: The best part of this film is definitely the news story beginning, as reporters announce that a South American dictator is going to be shot before it actually happens is hilarious. The entire film is charming and farcical as well as an excellent work in satire done in the Woody Allen style.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Marx Brothers Inspired, Woody Silliness at its best.
Review: The mixing of bad puns, intellectual comedy, satire, farce and slapstick isn't seamless, but it sure is funny. Most of the jokes are as funny or as bad as they were 30 years ago. Some of the jokes have turned out to be prophetic.

I had not seen the film in nearly 20 years yet remembered it well as I watched the recently released DVD. It's still very funny stuff. The pacing of course is a little slower than how it might be done today--but not much.

I wonder if people under 25 will understand how funny the scenes with Howard Cosell are? Will they know how outrageous and even daring this material was 30 years ago? I'm not sure.

Some of the references and therefore the jokes might fall flat if you don't have a knowledge of late 60's/early 70's American pop culture and news events.

Early in the film Allen who plays a product tester, is testing an executive exercise device, paying homage to Chaplin's Modern Times, and it seems like the scene could have been out of the Farelly brothers latest comedy.

There are several one-liners like one about how common it is to attack an American Embassy which were fairly innocent and funny in 1971, 8 years before Tehran, but are more double edged when heard today.

The film is an homage to his favorite film comedians, the Marx Brothers. The title; Bananas a nod to the Marx Brothers Coconuts, the plot loosely inspired in spirit by Duck Soup and there's even a gag involving a harp, a tribute to Harpo.

We have very witty comments about the media, the very funny (and before it's time) New Testament Cigarette Ad, Allen's first dream sequence involving two groups of monks carrying two men on crosses (one being Allen, one being Allen Garfield) who wind up in fisticuffs over a parking place.

There's the wonderful scene where Allen desperate for some companionship tries to impress a female signature gatherer (played by Louise Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Lasser --his then wife) by pretending to be interested in Yoga, and attending various protests. This leads to Allen unwillingly joining a real revolution in a small South American Country, impersonating it's president to ask the American Government for money and... well don't ask... it actually almost makes sense which is part of what makes it all the more funny.

There's also Howard Cosell and AbC world wide Sports coverage of the assasination and later the wedding night, and for all of us who grew up on the East Coast, newscaster Roger Grimsby playing himself. The wonderful goofy musical score by Marvin Hamlish is just right too.

The DVD has a great transfer of a beautiful wide-screen print but no extras. Although the DVD didn't include the original brilliant radio ad for the film, it does have the wonderful original theatrical trailer for the film which is almost as good. It's one of my favorite trailers.

Chris Jarmick, Author (The Glass Cocoon with Serena F. Holder-a steamy cyber- thriller ...)

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Entertaining spoof
Review: This 1971 satire has little in the way of plot, but is amusing enough, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. Noticeably more chaotic and lowbrow than subsequent offerings, but seeds of the later, more sophisticated Allen are discernible nonetheless.


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