Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Midnight in Paris (2011)


Academy Awards, USA
YearResultAwardCategory/Recipient(s)
2012 Won Oscar Best Writing, Original Screenplay
Woody Allen
Woody Allen was not present at the awards ceremony. Presenter Angelina Jolie accepted the award on his behalf.
Nominated Oscar Best Achievement in Directing
Woody Allen
Best Art Direction
Anne Seibel (production designer)
Hélène Dubreuil (set decorator)
Best Motion Picture of the Year
Letty Aronson
Stephen Tenenbaum

Sony Pictures Classics
Directed by Woody Allen
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Starz)

Sentimental fluff about a writer in Paris with his fiance and her parents who gets whisked away to the Paris of the 1920s by taxi each night at midnight. He meets famous literary and art figures such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, etc. He falls in love with a girl from the past, throwing light on his incompatibility with his fiance of the present. The "minor insight" of the lead character, and the film, is that the present is so unfulfilling that we look to the past for escape. The girl from the past looks to her own past for fulfillment, and so on. It's too bad that Woody is now too old to play the parts he writes, because I never quite got past the feeling that I was watching Owen Wilson doing a bad impression of Woody Allen for the entire film. If only it were 1977!

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