Gentile Makes “Annie Hall” Update
Maybe he needed the eggs. That’s my best guess as to what’s going on in this confounding — but sometimes funny — video that just turned up online. Brooklyn-based filmmaker J.D. Oxblood has posted the trailer to an unfinished romantic comedy he’s calling “#AnnieHall,” a Brooklyn-based, present-day find-and-replace riff on Woody Allen’s epochal 1977 film. In this iteration, Annie Hall is Minnie Wohl, a “nice Yeshiva girl” who resists being dragged by her lover to see “The Battle of Algiers,” Oxblood’s replacement for “The Sorrow and the Pity.” Allen’s Alvy Singer, meanwhile, is now a blond goy, a comedy writer whose paranoia that the world’s prejudiced against him now has a tinge of Tea Party dada: Rather than insist that he was subjected to the question “Jew eat?” this tanned schlemiel carps that a Pakistani called him “Whitey.”
