I first saw this alleged masterpiece in a theatre when it came out. I will refrain from commenting on that experience except to note that I (and the three other patrons in the whole theatre) walked out midway through the movie realizing that we should cut our losses and leave. As college students, our time was not particularly valuable but we had already lost an hour of our lives that we would never get back.
Fast forward many years to a sleepless night. Apparently, HBO or Showtime had acquired this stinker as filler for the 3:00 AM time slot. Wanting desperately to enter dreamland, I watched the entirety of the meager offering and realized that it was not callow immaturity that had me turn my nose at this dreck many years before. This is truly a bad movie. It is filled with the usual self-absorptive navel gazing that any Woody Allen product is famous for but it does it on a scale of grand pretentiousness (eg. b&w, the notion that pubescent girls are attracted to trolls, the waste of otherwise talented people) that dwarfs anything that this Ed Wood impersonator has done before or since.
The genius of Woody Allen is not in his "art" but in his marketing skill. He has convinced an enormous portion of the "faux art house" crowd that his output is somehow sublimely transcendant and that those who view his ego driven made for TV releases are indeed fortunate that he has allowed them to shell out hard earned money time and again for the same story with different faces. Where was this guy when Coca Cola trotted out New Coke. He should have been in charge of the ad campaign.
Enough general adulation for our diminutive hero. The movie recounts the threadbare old male fantasy of the older dude getting the young chick and then realizing that older chicks are better lays. I would swear that Richard Gere has done variations on this movie at least a dozen times. Woodrow is entirely unbelievable in the role of the older dude. I suppose that he realized the limitations of his performance when he insisted on redoing the movie for free. In the ensuing decades since its release, Woodrow has worked on various stage versions of this role, culminating in his relationship with his adopted- step- semi- daughter. I think I speak for most Americans when I say "eeeeewwwwwwwwww".
At any rate, don't waste money renting Manhattan. Don't waste time watching it. Don't think that it will put you to sleep because you will not rest knowing that a good number of people set out to make an acceptable movie and somewhere along the way things went very wrong.
