Woody's Midnight in Paris

No thread for this? Pretty fun. Oddly Inception-like in its structure. The actors sold even the moldy lines.

Maybe this is vaguely challopsy but I found it seriously irritating.

I couldn't stand it.

I think most of the chatter is in the woody allen thread. (I could be wrong; I've been avoiding that thread since I haven't seen the movie yet.)

you're right, jaymc

for some reason people in my theater exploded w/applause whenever they recognized one of the historical figures - especially this one lady way in the back who would go OH MY GODDDDD at every reveal

i thought it was fun. doesnt make much sense, even on a character motivation level, and its not nearly as much of a "valentine to paris" or whatever as the marketing campaign would like you to believe. but owen wilson is a good woody substitute and the (self-congratulatory) english-major jokes are good

for some reason people in my theater exploded w/applause whenever they recognized one of the historical figures - especially this one lady way in the back who would go OH MY GODDDDD at every reveal

― Ayatollah Colm Meaney (Princess TamTam), Wednesday, July 6, 2011 9:03 AM (48 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

heh, when i saw this the biggest laugh was the throwaway djuna barnes line i assume because everyone wanted their companions to know that they got the joke, djuna barnes, shes a lesbian, how droll

Here's where the most recent debate starts.

I'm glad he'll enjoy his biggest hit since Hannah, but it's like a cook enjoying his biggest hit with microwaved pasta.

I forget who called it "A Night at the Museum for liberal-arts grads."

That description makes total sense. And I definitely felt the self-congratulation in the theater with each historical figure. While watching, I did picture some dud lines as they would appear in one of his not-funny Shouts and Murmurs pieces.

Mostly it's Owen Wilson and the locations that made it work for me -- Owen W. being comfortable with his own rhythms and ways, and as far as the locations, Rohmer's gone, so...

Thanks, A,LS--thought there might be talk of it somewhere else but wasn't sure which Woody Allen thread.

"A Night at the Museum for liberal-arts grads."

HA! That's funny.

But so is the movie.

Having Owen Wilson end up with a young looking girl is kinda creepy Woody Allen. Yes, there were funny scenes with Hemingway and Dali, but too much of the script was just Woody Allen on autopilot.

on a plane missing a rudder, wings, and proper food.

the thing that bugged me most--rachel mcadams is supposed to be this kind of... well she doesnt care about owen wilsons writing or anything? or culture? but then shes really into michael sheen?

I thought the flea-market gal was Kate Moss until I saw the credits (even though I knew she looked young for 2010).

i laughed at some of the hemingway stuff but here was the really representative Late Woody line in this one: "As you know, I'm excited about the upcoming business deal with the large French company."

"as you know"

haha was that really a line?? jeeesus

"As you know, I'm excited about the upcoming business deal with the large French company."

l'omg. dying

"Remember we have that private exhibit at the museum tonight. Paul is a Monet expert, you know"

A poll on Woody's worst examples of exposition would be painful.

idk i havent seen this or anything but i tend to find his clunkiness p charming, like i like a lot of the ones everyone hates. i dont even hate interiors.

how is it charming?

I might find it so if the movie offered compensatory pleasures.

then I realized that the whole fucking movie was exposition for a movie that never started.

idk its like when you know somebody whose emails are exactly like how they talk

Woody doesn't talk that way. NOBODY talks that way.

i want to talk that way

which I would accept if his fantasies were better drawn these days.

xpost

i dont think you're really getting what im saying

it saddens me to give up on Woody, but I have.

"lol he talks like he writes" is amusing for half a second -- are the talking and writing any good?

i think i intended that analogy a lot more loosely than you're taking it

we write like we right.

its less the expository dialog thats amazing and more the fact that he cant even be bothered to fill in the blanks

he literally wont take 90 seconds to think up a kind of business deal or the name of a french company. they dont even have to be jokes!

like i don't even mean dialogue exactly, you know the bit in annie hall where he's talking about alison portchnik and the kindof relationship between diane keaton talking about her and then him doing this little character sketch to her face. its really like the process of remembering an anecdote, and i think a lot of his stuff is how things get literalised in some way through how they're told and this can seem really clunky and rough but in a way thats kindof oddly right. i feel like crimes and misdemeanours has loads of great examples of this maybe. anyway like i said i haven't seen this movie i guess im just like addicted to my own opinions.

Plus he won't bother to establish whether the actor cast can incarnate the intelligence he's supposed to project. I didn't buy for a moment that Wilson would have known (let alone appreciated) Stein, Bunuel, etc, just like McAdams looks too sensible to be a harridan.

Biggest grossing Woody movie in US ever apparently - just overtook Hannah and Her Sisters.

i haven't seen this movie but i would buy owen wilson being familiar with gertrude stein and luis bunuel!

oh man im all about hannah and her sisters

in a better written and directed movie I would!

xpost

Biggest grossing Woody movie in US ever apparently

daily stories in the NYT for 2 wks probably didn't hurt

i think your problem is you're worrying about wh/ or not this is good like just relax really its a movie

Plus he won't bother to establish whether the actor cast can incarnate the intelligence he's supposed to project. I didn't buy for a moment that Wilson would have known (let alone appreciated) Stein, Bunuel, etc, just like McAdams looks too sensible to be a harridan.

― The Edge of Gloryhole (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, July 13, 2011 6:06 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the part thats hard to buy is that mcadams would be annoyed with wilson for being a dreamy writer type but love sheen for being a dickish intellectual

yeah whatryou gonna do, ppl are inconsistent.

What're you going to do except post on a message board?

i guess i could finish packing?

Who exactly has claimed that this it "Woody's triumphant return to form"? All the reviews I've read have said that it's a piece on amusing fluff, I definitely didn't expect anything more, and wasn't disappointed.

It's gonna get multiple Academy Award nominations and has won a bucketful of other honors, if you use that sort of thing as a yardstick.

Bill & Ted's > this movie

I was just constantly like "oh of course Dali is ridiculous" and "of course they're now going back to HER golden age" as in lol, this is fluff, but why not?

Yeah, I pretty much had this reaction.

its also made a shitload of money

second only to The Help in attendance by senior citizens, I imagine.

The Help badly needed some time travel, btw

shit, I can't believe my "tv vs. movies" poll was on the sandbox, i was going to post "midnight in paris" to push everyone over to TV :(

Who exactly has claimed that this it "Woody's triumphant return to form"?

there was a story about this movie and how great it was EVERY DAY FOR AN ENTIRE WEEK in the New York Times when this came out.

It is annoying that it was so successful and highly praised, but that doesn't make the movie itself any worse than it actually is.

Though it is kind of lol that it will be only the third Woody Allen movie nom'd for Best Pic.

Bill & Ted's > this movie

I'd like a word with whomever was arguing otherwise.

This def was not deserving of any Oscar noms though.

i feel bad saying this after friends have said they like it but i feel like 75% of the enjoyment people get from this movie is feeling smart after they recognize the historical figures

I don't know about that, he pretty much put nametags on 90% of the historical figures.

yes it is, bcz the Oscars define middlebrow shruggery

xxp

guys i really didn't like this movie

Woody probably would've done better adapting his short story where Madame Bovary comes out of the book into contemporary NYC and has an affair.

I don't know about that, he pretty much put nametags on 90% of the historical figures.

I suppose the pleasure in recognition also encompasses how the figures conform to their broad-stroke popular images, e.g. a couple of throwaway jokes about Gertrude Stein being a lesbian because that's all anyone who hasn't actually read her writing knows about her.

If I'm feeling charitable, though, I can sort of defend this by pointing out that the entire fantasy-world is seen through the eyes of Gil, who himself romanticizes these figures without much deep understanding.

i think it was max upthread who pointed out just how slapdash and lazy woody's scripting is these days (perhaps always was) - so the images of paris are cliched and not even especially pretty, the characters are stock caricatures etc etc. but i actually like these late period woodys precisely because of their crudeness and functionality, his compulsion to still crank out a movie a year, wherever he can raise the cash. places like paris, london, barcelona are actually irrelevant to the endless eternal grind of allenville. some of these films - particularly the excellent You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger - remind me a little of rohmer, another compulsive filmmaker who spent his career spinning variations on a tiny, concentrated set of obsessions and passions.

I went to a party this weekend and asked a crowd of people what their favorite movie of 2011 was and they almost all said it was this movie.

It was very hard for me to not just go home.

One other defense of the film: Owen Wilson reciting Woody Allen dialogue is lots of fun to imitate.

What was your favorite movie of 2011, polyphonic?

i feel bad saying this after friends have said they like it but i feel like 75% of the enjoyment people get from this movie is feeling smart after they recognize the historical figures

^^^ this, especially for the geriatric crowd.

Owen Wilson was fine as the Woody proxy though.

Also: the Rachel McAdams half of the movie was spectacularly lame. I just have no patience anymore for Woody's hamhanded exposition (e.g. "Remember we have that private exhibit at the museum tonight. Paul is a Monet expert, you know").

― The Edge of Gloryhole (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, June 11, 2011 12:51 PM

What was your favorite movie of 2011, polyphonic?

My favorite 2011 movie was Attack the Block. The best movie I saw this year in general was The Woman in the Dunes.

xpost to Alfred, I didn't really read that so much as needless exposition as a hamfisted way for McAdams' character to remind Wilson how much better Paul was than him; still annoying dialog though

this is the guy who gave a character in September the line, "We have to get back to the city, honey. We don't want to miss that Kurosawa festival!"

I dunno the gross and cheap way in which he treated the McAdams character is line with Claire Bloom, Helena Bonham Carter, and other stranded female leads.

*is in line with what he did to

but i actually like these late period woodys precisely because of their crudeness and functionality, his compulsion to still crank out a movie a year, wherever he can raise the cash.

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, January 12, 2012 5:42 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark

but do you really enjoy the movies? just sounds like u like the idea of them...

^^^ this, especially for the geriatric crowd.

― lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, January 12, 2012 5:49 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark

the young ppl get into it too

i dunno if 'enjoy' is exactly right, but perhaps the comparison i wld make is that it's like listening to an old old jazz dude, like late european dexter gordon concert recordings, where the chops maybe aren't quite what they were but there is still the need/ability/stamina/experience to carry on making art, and it's quite moving and even inspiring to see that

Woody Allen is definitely that kind of guy for me, but I 100% am down with what Ward Fowler is getting at.

"definitely NOT that kind of guy for me"

Woody probably would've done better adapting his short story where Madame Bovary comes out of the book into contemporary NYC and has an affair.

I didn't know anything at all about the plot going into it so when the time-travel fantasy stuff kicked in I was super-delighted to be seeing The Kugelmass Episode: The Movie!

ok "excellent" is really not the word for You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

wow, never heard of that before, it didn't even get released here

thought gemma jones was superb in YWMATDS, one of the best female performances in an allen film, and the autumnal mise-en-scene (vilmos zsigmond!) was well suited to a film about love and desire in old age (old age being a subject that allen - and cinema in general - tends to avoid. Maybe the new haneke will change that!)

Not sure if this was the Woody Allen version of the "Willoughby" Twilight Zone episode or the Rod Serling version of "Play It Again Sam." Kinda liked it, but glad it was short.

Like the US Supreme Court thread, every time this one is revived my heart trembles.

not as bad as I expected this to be tbh. which is probably the highest praise I can give it.

altho dude who portrayed Hemingway made me want to shoot him in the face

a metaphor Hemingway understood all too well

lol

Owen carried the entire movie imho, nobody else really had anything to work with - no jokes, no characters

I knew this bit as a teenager, don't think it's been mentioned -- God knows it's funnier than MiP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z85zt_EUySg

i rly liked this movie

I just watched this tonight, I really enjoyed it! It's not amazing Woody, that's fine and I didn't really expect that...but I found it lighthearted and wistful. It put me in a good mood.

As an aside, and I think this was mentioned upthread: WS Rachel McAdams in this movie. Whoa. I've never really looked at her in a phwoar way. But the translucent shirt dresses and tight jeans etc, kinda ridic.

saw this on a plane to Paris two nights ago, & enjoyed it enough to skip faking sleep during the Atlantic crossing. I thought it was very superficial & knowingly so: like the whole "point" is that Americans loving Paris is a "thing" obv: all those Monet posters in dorm rooms etc. & "Americans in Paris" is also a "thing": I spend a lot of time in Paris with Americans, & you can't help it if you're here; this morning walking along the Blvd St Germain I heard more American English than French, trying to walk past e.g. a gaggle of ladies in their 60s gawking at cathedrals in the distance. They come here & hit the highlights & then they skip out, without speaking French ; at least, I know a lot of Americans who do this. It's no problem! It's a lovely place for superficial gawking. But I got that Allen was poking fun at that by filming Paris this way; like the scenes could have been anywhere; there was almost nothing distinctive about this film being set in Paris: but I think that was the point? it's not the deepest point in the world to make, obv, but I dunno you spend enough time in the Great Cities of Olde Europe & you become accustomed to this mode of tourism amongst Americans & whilst it needn't grate it sticks with you.

Yeah, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona there's a line in the voiceover that I thought conveys the same thing:

Vicky and Cristina drank in the artistic treasures of the city. They particularly enjoyed the works of Gaudí and Miró.

there is something so kind of automated about neo-Woody that makes it hard to grant that sort of moment the judgment of being wry. i think a lot of the decisions, cinematographic, stock character rendering, territory, &c, are so generic & reflexive it's not hard to imagine he's just writing "gaudi & miro because spain"

Could have watched much more Hemingway parody.