The annual Woody Allen film can be hit or miss, but this year’s Midnight in Paris is a comedy-with-a-message homerun.
Owen Wilson’s character is a Hollywood screenwriter trying to go “legitimate” and write a novel. He romanticizes 1920s Paris and lost after a night of drinking, takes a seat on a set of stairs. The clock strikes midnight, and an old-fashioned car pulls up in front of him, the inhabitants insisting he join them at the party they are heading to. At that party he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Cole Porter. The next evening, not sure that what he experienced that night was not just a hallucination, he tries to bring along his fussy fiancée–played by Rachel McAdams (whose figure ::ahem:: looks lovely walking away from the camera)–to the same spot to prove to her he hasn’t gone loony. Fed up of waiting, she takes a cab back to the hotel before the clock strikes midnight, and he continues his strange time-traveling adventure without her, meeting more and more of the period’s notable artistes. He finds himself enjoying the professional support and personal company of the writers and artists and winds up further rousing suspicion with–and annoying–his wife-to-be and future in-laws with his insistence on nightly “walks around town.”
Let’s call the movie something of a mix like Bill & Ted meets Easy A meets The Hangover meets Donnie Darko. I’ll explain. (more…)
