{"id":39,"date":"2011-06-18T16:34:14","date_gmt":"2011-06-18T20:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=39"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:40:27","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:40:27","slug":"midnight-in-manhattan-er-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=39","title":{"rendered":"Midnight in Manhattan, er Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems difficult to review a Woody Allen picture these days without discussing his personal situation.\u00a0 The problem is that, much as he denies it, Woody\u2019s pictures are often subtly autobiographical.\u00a0 Allen\u2019s new picture, Midnight in Paris<\/em>, is about a screenwriter disenchanted with his work in Hollywood who wants to start over in Europe.\u00a0 Um, well, there goes art imitating life again.\u00a0 Allen\u2019s last several films have been financed and shot mostly in Europe.<\/p>\n

Many people have suspected that Allen was losing his touch.\u00a0 His films were not as self-assured, and they had less of a smooth feel than he\u2019d been able to achieve earlier.\u00a0 I\u2019m happy to report that this now seems a temporary aberration.\u00a0 Midnight in Paris<\/em> marks a return to the \u201cclassic\u201d Woody style, whatever that is.\u00a0 It\u2019s not like one of his \u201cearlier, funny films,\u201d and it\u2019s not like his Bergman-obsessed works like Interiors<\/em>, but it has elements of both, and they work together well.<\/p>\n

In Midnight in Paris<\/em>, a screenwriter (Owen Wilson) is visiting Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her family.\u00a0 Weary of his hackneyed Hollywood jobs, he\u2019s working on a novel about a guy who works in a nostalgia shop.\u00a0 While McAdams and her mother shop all over Paris, they meet up with a blowhard know-nothing (Michael Sheen).\u00a0 He\u2019s the type of guy who doesn\u2019t really know all that he thinks he knows, especially about art and history.\u00a0 These scenes are extremely reminiscent of ones in Allen\u2019s film Manhattan<\/em>, as is the entire sub-plot in which McAdams\u2019 character falls for Sheen\u2019s.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s fine, since the bulk of the plot covers some familiar themes in very nice new ways.\u00a0 Disgusted with those around him, Wilson goes off for a walk and discovers himself in the Paris of the 1920s.\u00a0 Allen handles this masterfully.\u00a0 The shift happens in an old area of the city that could have been in the 2000s or 1920s, and we\u2019re not quite certain how it works for a while.\u00a0 The mechanics of how the time travel actually happens are never explained or even explored.\u00a0 It\u2019s simply a plot device.\u00a0 Allen uses it but doesn\u2019t exploit it.\u00a0 James Cameron, please pay attention here.<\/p>\n

Once in the 1920s, the film takes off.\u00a0 If you\u2019re one of those people who knows nothing about Paris in the 1920s, then you may be left out of a lot of the plot.\u00a0 I\u2019d encourage you to read up a little on it before you see the film.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t stop to spoon-feed you along.\u00a0 Wilson\u2019s character meets Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and a host of others.\u00a0 The casting is impeccable.\u00a0 Of particular merit are Kathy Bates as Stein and Adrien Brody as Dali.<\/p>\n

While in the 1920s, Wilson meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard).\u00a0 Cotillard\u2019s character, like Wilson\u2019s, feels stuck in the wrong time.\u00a0 While Wilson would prefer to live in the time of the 1920s, Cotillard (native to the 1920s) yearns for the Paris of the 1890s with Lautrec and others.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no point in giving more of the plot away; the rest of it is quite engaging and shows Allen\u2019s comic introspection wonderfully.\u00a0 The question of whether to live in the past or the present is addressed quite humorously.<\/p>\n

The real revelation in Midnight in Paris <\/em>is that Owen Wilson is quite good!\u00a0 I\u2019ve long considered Wilson a lightweight comedic actor of limited talent.\u00a0 He\u2019s been in more of his share of movies that are overloaded with fart jokes, and I was beginning to think of him as limited to those kinds of things.\u00a0 I had quite liked him in The Royal Tenenbaums <\/em>(2001), but most of the rest of the time, he\u2019s been like a cut-rate Adam Sandler.\u00a0 His character in Midnight in Paris <\/em>is clearly written as the Woody Allen character… you can hear the text is written for those inflections.\u00a0 The challenge for Wilson is to play a Woody character but still make it his own.\u00a0 I\u2019m happy to report that he rises to this challenge admirably.<\/p>\n

There are still things I\u2019m not quite enchanted about in Midnight in Paris<\/em>, but very few of them.\u00a0 The most striking one is that we know it\u2019s a Woody Allen film because the colors are biased dramatically toward yellow all the way through.\u00a0 There\u2019s less of this than there has been in previous Allen efforts, but I hope he gets it out of his system some day.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to recommend this film to everyone I can, because I\u2019m really not pleased about the current trend of movies that have to credit Stan Lee and have a roman numeral in the title.\u00a0 Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with that… but there is something wrong that we have so much <\/em>of it.\u00a0 Midnight in Paris <\/em>is smart, not based on a comic book, and it\u2019s not a sequel to anything.\u00a0 May it play to packed houses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems difficult to review a Woody Allen picture these days without discussing his personal situation.\u00a0 The problem is that, much as he denies it, Woody\u2019s pictures are often subtly autobiographical.\u00a0 Allen\u2019s new picture, Midnight in Paris, is about a screenwriter disenchanted with his work in Hollywood who wants to start over in Europe.\u00a0 Um, … Continue reading “Midnight in Manhattan, er Paris”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207,4],"tags":[40,41,39],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-views-and-reviews","tag-midnight-in-paris","tag-review","tag-woody-allen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}