'Have you ever shot a charging lion?'
About every other week since June, someone told me I needed to see Midnight in Paris. After the Hemingway-meets-Agile post, someone told me about once a day. Opportunities to see the movie came and went in moderately disappointing fashion until Thursday I finally saw it with a visiting Lindsay. And, yes, Hemingway was my favorite character. To hear him demand answers to questions of manliness made the night.
In name, the movie was about writing and the creative process, which made me predisposed to like it. But in reality, the movie was about life and the living process, which of course fed the creative process, which made me love it. The movie wasn't perfect, not close. But it delighted.
The pacing was pretty strange. I got the feeling working with Woody Allen now was like working with the Muppets. Either you instinctively understood how to fit in and live inside that world, or you didn't and wandered around the world with a semi-dazed look on your face as weirdos yammered at you. In Midnight, Rachel McAdams, Carla Bruni, Kathy Bates, Michael Sheen, and even F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were on the dazed side, a bit slow and confused. On the other side, fitting in well were Marion Cotillard, Adrien Brody and Hemingway.
Owen Wilson was somehow on both sides. Lindsay explained it best, saying he played smart enough to appreciate the time travel but also dumb enough to make us buy its possibility. There were moments he seemed unsure what approach to take, but by in large he acquitted himself just fine. I went home wanting to see Woody use him again.
I also went home wanting to read a book and go to Paris. The movie warned about the second desire and asked for good reasons, which was fair. Good reasons, such as for movie-going, always came along.
January 26th, 2012 at 11:10 PM
[...] Oscar two nominees I'd seen, the movie was better than Midnight in Paris (terrific and lovable at many points, uneven at others) and incomparable to Tree of Life (with which I was one of the few folks in my [...]