A very resilient little muscle

Hannah and Her Sisters

(1986)

Even though this is one of my four or five favorite Woody Allen films, I hadn't watched it in more than five years, the reason being that I associate it with Thanksgiving, so whenever I considered watching it at some time other than late November--and let's face it: the vast majority of the calendar is not late November--I always found something else to watch instead. And the reason I associate it with Thanksgiving is less that it begins and ends at Thanksgiving and has another Thanksgiving in between than the fact that the more recent of my wives liked to have the VCR of the film playing so that she could listen to it while cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

So I'm kinda proud of myself for breaking the calendrical shackles and letting myself watch it almost as far from Thanksgiving as the calendar gets. And golly, I had forgotten how deeply it Roto-Roots my emotional plumbing, or maybe it never did it as effectively before as it did this time. The domestic scenes were particularly moving: connubial bliss to connubial battleground, all of it, but especially the low-key connubial matter-of-factness.

Favorite cast catch: noticed that that's a young (or younger, anyway) Richard Jenkins whom Mickey (Allen) consults by phone to ask the worst-case scenario of his symptoms. Maybe next time I'll notice the appearances of J.T. Walsh or Julia Louis-Dreyfus.