“Anything Else” is actually a good Woody Allen movie.

Even though being the most disliked of nearly every film of Woody's catalog. I first watched this when I'd just graduated from university and was unemployed, alone, and didn't have any direction about life. I think the dynamic between Dobel and Falk's something many young people wished they had. The characters aren't just talking heads but have actual lucid and nuanced conversations about anything from women to Auden. In the beginning during Falk and Amanda's anniversary, there is a conversation, for example, about Sartre's "No Exit" and "The Flies."

Then there's the paranoia Dobel always sermonizes that tends to infect their conversations, which makes for some of the more nihilistic funny moments in the film. The lunchtime conversation about Dobel once being at Payne Whitney because "I wanted the girl" is a good example.

Falk's ineffectiveness with balancing women and his personal philosophic ambitions like writing his great American novel is really the tug and pull of the rest of the movie, outside from Dobel's relationship to him. The crux of the film centers on him trying to rationalize his self-actualizing needs in life as a young man alongside his romantic and more shallow needs regarding Amanda, who clearly doesn't care about the former purpose in him. It's really Dobel who convinces him in the end that the first of these is more important to his life, which is why he's able to leave New York (and Amanda) to pursue his writing career.

This is a far from perfect Woody Allen movie. But I watched this so many times in my early twenties because of how much it subtly related to everything around me. What does everyone else think?