Travel and Nostalgia

I just got back to Ghana from Kyrgyzstan and even with modern jet travel the trip is physically exhausting. I spent over 24 hours flying from Bishkek to Istanbul to London to Accra. I can not imagine being able to actually survive a similar trip without airtravel. Frederick Burnaby wrote about his 1875 trip to Central Asia in _A Ride to Khiva._ He did not have the African leg, but went from St. Petersburg to Sizeran which is west of Samara by rail and then had to make the rest of the trip to Khiva overland. The description of the trek indicates that it was quite difficult and dangerous. Had he done the same trip I just did by air he would have had to add the dangers of yellow fever, malaria, and other tropical diseases without the benefit of 20th century medicine. So I have no nostalgia for primitive travel. Modern travel and problems are taxing enough

Yes, Midnight in Paris was sort of a satisfying movie. It got silly towards the end when the story went further back in time. One part that stood out with me is how the America father seemed so horrified to see a dog in the restaurant. It was satisfying when Wilson’s character dumped that nauseating American family. But of all the drop-ins I like the Hemingway character best.

After the movie I thought of Allen’s movie Manhattan Murder Mystery. That movie also got silly towards the end.

I’m with salazar – I think it was a nice little movie.
Certainly not great – the cliched Americans, the supposedly “deep” insight that nostalgia exists in any age, etc. –
but it was nicely shot and looked pretty, didn’t shy away from the magical realism (i.e. there was no stupid dream/coma etc. explanation for the time travel – I really appreciated that), it made us laugh and smile (yes, especially Hemingway), it had good music…

There really aren’t that many good, light movies, so I really liked Midnight in Paris for what it was. It sounds like your expectations might have been a little inflated?

I enjoyed it while I was watching it, as did the suburban audience I saw it with. Ultimately, though, the cartoonish nature of the fantasy was hard to take. I guess the protagonist got the cartoon version of the 20s because his fantasy was already a cartoon. Hence the campy impersonations by the actors having a bit too much fun with their parts. The film embraces nostalgia and then appears to reject it–but all the fun is in the nostalgia.

If he admires the 20s so much, why is he dressed liked someone from the 70s, with unstylish corduroy jacket? I guess that’s because he has to be a visitor from an age without style.

The tea-party sympathizing future father-in-law was also a cartoon, so you had to root for the guy to dump his fiancee and her odious family.

Ross is, of course, a palaeontologist. (I know this only because my son watches repeats of Friends constantly.)

But Paris sounds like a fun film, and I’ll add it to my list. Which I won’t be doing with Battle Los Angeles. Life is short — I keep trying to remind my son of that, but Friends still keeps on churning away….

The in-joke is a pleasure for those who understand, and as for those who don’t, well there’s sheer shared pleasure in knowing that somewhere someone simply doesn’t get it, as well. Buñuel’s bewildered “Why don’t they just leave?” is a pretty good punch line for those who know The Exterminating Angel, even if only by reputation.

So the main shtick of the movie is to set up just that sort of situation again and again, in which the audience’s cultural literacy is so smoothly pandered to (we need just the bits of celebrity that have passed down to us about some famous lives and their works), and we are pleased, entertained, to find we pass the test. We get our ’20’s expat Paris, a bit of our Gay Nineties Paris, and just a soupçon of our 17th c. Versailles to round it all out.

It’s a bourgeois confection, and that’s not a complaint, just a reflection on what sort of movies Allen cares to make these days, with all the good dining and nice clothes and attractive folks. It’s o.k. Plus, Carla Bruni is gorgeous, it turns out, just like everybody’s been saying. Nice to have that confirmed.

Yeah, when I heard Bunnuel’s line, I thought of John Holbo and Crooked Timber. I liked the pontificating pedant, too. Yeah, it was a little pat and self-satisfied and like every other Woody Allen movie (everybody has a past time they would rather be in (especially artists), and it can be hard for an artist to let go of the loved one who is part of the more materialistic general culture he needs to escape to make room for his art. And it was formulaic, and its being formulaic has begun to seem like a way to avoid any embarrassing implication of the stuff that’s gone on in the filmmaker’s real life. Hemingway was funny because that’s the way everyone thinks his books sound (but not the way the book on tape I heard sounds, so maybe that’s not really what his writing is like), and is that really the advice Gertrude Stein would have given him?

There were some good bits. Some of it seemed phoned in. It was the first movie I’ve seen in a theater since The Dark Knight, though.

And yeah, this is what they have been like for some time. The one with Larry David: Annie Hall with a mother who really wants to be an artist. The one with Javier Bardem: ditto.

salazar: his supposedly funny—and totally incomprehensible—stuff from the 1970s

You mean Sleeper, Bananas, Love and Death, Annie Hall, Manhattan? Sheesh!

I realize this is an absurd response, but Midnight in Paris made me kinda depressed. It just seemed like another reminder that I have never made the most of my talents, such as they are, and that I really should have stuck to it more and produced some really good writing. Oh well.

While I was amused by the Buñuel appearances (also a nod to Annie Hall of course, as the famous scene with McLuhan was originally intended to feature Buñuel), Allen got the character all wrong. Buñuel in the 1920s was much closer to the portrayal of Hemingway — brash, irritating, macho, vigorous — not the wee nebbish that Allen shows. Brody’s Dali was anachronistic too — it’s the 1960s Dali we see, not the weird little troll he actually was in his youth.

I think the American Express ad comparison is well-made. Where’s the dogshit? Where’s the North Africans? Where’s the graffiti? (There’s a tiny bit on the bookseller’s stall about 3/4 of the way through, but other than that, it was remarkably absent.) It reminds me of Powaqqatsi where we go most of the film without seeing a single advertisement or trademark.

Geo: You mean Sleeper, Bananas, Love and Death, Annie Hall, Manhattan? Sheesh!

Tell you what: I’ll give Take the Money and Run a pass.

I just watched it now, a bad avi copy, probably same quality as an airplane movie. Yeah, what John Holbo said.
Yeah, Match Point was a good one.

Why is Gil with these people?

This is one of the most baffling things about this movie (and there are other movies with the same flaw, obviously): Gil and wossname are supposed to be engaged. How the hell did that happen? Was there some important even just prior to the beginning of the movie that put their entire relationship on a completely different footing, or have they always been so obviously unsuited for each other?

I thought it was diverting enough.

The Bunuel joke could be said to have been stolen from Back to the Future.

Well, yeah. But surely we’re supposed to think Gil planted the seed.

“The secret is to hire great people, let them do what they do, don’t interfere too much and then when they’re great, take the credit. I’ve done this for many years and it works like a charm.”

-Woody Allen

I would like to capitalize more on that myself.

Being allergic to Woody Allen in all his incarnations, I should keep my mouth shut here — but of course I won’t. Anyway, the last thing I remembered liking from him was a description of his mother knitting a chicken, and getting straightaway into the furnace when he brought home a shiksa for her to admire. That was long ago, and it wasn’t a movie. Since then, I’ve tended to walk away from the occasional Allen rapture as soon as polite discourse allows.

Who cares.

Well everyone who saw it in the N. London cinema with me, for a start.

I don’t think anything he’s done so far could be mistaken for realism.

I don’t remember the stilted dialogue, or the cliched characters in his early films. I can only imagine that if he made a film set in Dublin all the characters would constantly mention the Craic, when they weren’t bursting into song and falling over drunk.

The only explanation I can come up with for why Americans thought it was good is that they really think English people are like this.

is this what woody allen movies have been lime for he last 20 years? unfortunately, midnight in paris is the best woody allen movie of the past 20 years…that’s how bad his movies have devolved to.

i thought paris was funny and i laughed many times, but yeah, it was slight. it was not as dense with ideas and just old-fashioned punchlines as his early flicks. but considering i didn’t expect to like it at all (hated matchpoint, vicki christie, deconstructing harry, the larry david one, the will ferrell one, etc.) i found paris to be enjoyable.

Skippy: “….considering i didn’t expect to like it at all (hated matchpoint, vicki christie, deconstructing harry, the larry david one, the will ferrell one, etc.) i found paris to be enjoyable.”

I’m surprised anyone would feel so strongly one way or the other about his work anyway these days. Again, I think he’s making nice, enjoyable and, yes, unpretentious little movies. Good cinematography, good casting, acceptable dialogue, occasional wit. Not a bad way to spend two hours once a year or so.

I do wonder, though, how he still finds anyone to finance his films. Has any of them made any money since “Hannah and Her Sisters?” Or is the Woody Allen cachet such that he’ll get films done no matter what?