HerDotness
Lady Babbleon
Sleeper was really good, Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex...etc. wasn't terrific until the bit where Allen is a reluctant sperm. The rest...fuggedaboudit.
However, Midnight In Paris is an absolute delight, lush with views of Paris day and night, even has a delightful cameo by the French first lady as a Rodin tour guide.
Gil Pender and his fiancee Inez are visiting Paris with her parents. The couple is obviously ill-suited. (Big surprise...it's a Woody Allen movie, so what else would they be?) He's a soulful sellout as a Hollywood screenwriter who aspires to write the Great American Novel; she aspires to exceed the Joneses in amassing enviable stuff.
Inez drags Gil along on a night of drunken revelry with a pedantic American expert-on-practically-everything and wife. Gil decides shortly before midnight--get it? midnight, the witching hour!--that he needs to walk off the booze a bit (Read: escape the tedium) and wanders down a sidestreet where he promptly gets lost, sits down on some steps and soon hears a church bell tolling midnight. At which point, a 1920's cab pulls up, an English-speaking man gestures to him to get in, he does (of course) and is introduced to Zelda, Scott and Ernest who take him to a party hosted by Cole who is playing and singing "Let's Do It" as they arrive.
If you don't know anything much about the Paris of the Lost Generation, you probably will sit through this movie going, "Okay, so he traveled back to Paris during the Roaring Twenties...and?" For those who know the backstory of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein and Toklas, along with Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, this movie will charm and entice you.
It's obvious here and there. Gee, who'd have thunk that the point might be that no one is ever satisfied with their present, sometime in the past is always the Golden Era? I'll excuse Allen for that and a few other such Mr. Obvious moments. The movie is simply a charming respite from the dissatisfying present...Oops!
However, Midnight In Paris is an absolute delight, lush with views of Paris day and night, even has a delightful cameo by the French first lady as a Rodin tour guide.
Gil Pender and his fiancee Inez are visiting Paris with her parents. The couple is obviously ill-suited. (Big surprise...it's a Woody Allen movie, so what else would they be?) He's a soulful sellout as a Hollywood screenwriter who aspires to write the Great American Novel; she aspires to exceed the Joneses in amassing enviable stuff.
Inez drags Gil along on a night of drunken revelry with a pedantic American expert-on-practically-everything and wife. Gil decides shortly before midnight--get it? midnight, the witching hour!--that he needs to walk off the booze a bit (Read: escape the tedium) and wanders down a sidestreet where he promptly gets lost, sits down on some steps and soon hears a church bell tolling midnight. At which point, a 1920's cab pulls up, an English-speaking man gestures to him to get in, he does (of course) and is introduced to Zelda, Scott and Ernest who take him to a party hosted by Cole who is playing and singing "Let's Do It" as they arrive.
If you don't know anything much about the Paris of the Lost Generation, you probably will sit through this movie going, "Okay, so he traveled back to Paris during the Roaring Twenties...and?" For those who know the backstory of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein and Toklas, along with Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, this movie will charm and entice you.
It's obvious here and there. Gee, who'd have thunk that the point might be that no one is ever satisfied with their present, sometime in the past is always the Golden Era? I'll excuse Allen for that and a few other such Mr. Obvious moments. The movie is simply a charming respite from the dissatisfying present...Oops!
