Midnight in Paris

It's been a very long time since I did this but with the London Screenwriter's Festival in a couple days I should really start again. I'll blog tomorrow about my expectations of the festival but just wanted to say some quick words about Midnight in Paris which I went to see this evening.

There's nothing really to analyse about it. Owen Wilson even brilliantly parodies the smallness of the story by literally saying 'I've had an insight' that nostalgia is not a very realistic emotion and life wasn't better back in the day. I listened to a The Q&A interview with Woody Allen where he talked about this with roughly an argument that went 'things were more beautiful but the medicine was shit so it's not really worth it'. I'm not someone prone to nostalgia. I work on the presumption that now is an exceptional time to be alive, especially as an educated 20 something in London, and so this is not one of those lessons that I in any way need to be reminded of.

But I wanted to pick up two things: first of all the romanticisation of artists. I love Allen's Hemingway. I haven't actually read much Hemingway (although will finally be reading A Farewell to Arms for my book club so will have more to say on this soon) but even I can recognise the parodies he's playing with. But I don't overall give that much of a shit about them. I love art not artists. Curmodgeonly instincts in me don't feel like the self-indulgent lives of artists who go around getting drunk and having wild affairs, being driven places by drivers they never even acknowledge and flying off to Africa are things to approve of. It's not that I don't think a couple evenings with them wouldn't be great but it's a funny kind of intellectual shallowness. My dad always likes to tease my mum that Jane Austen is mills and boon for those with English degrees but I certainly think Allen films are extremely base films for people who consume high culture. You laugh at Hemingway impressions and the constant name checking but basically it's beautiful cities, beautiful women (seriously are there two more beautiful woman alive then Rachel McAdams and Marion Cotillard) people with impossibly wonderful lives being successful and lazy artistic types and smug jokes. I really enjoyed it. It has great charm. But it feels at the same time as if it has less to say then most Will Ferrell movies.

Secondly it's about beautiful cities. I really like that line Owen Wilson has about how he feels a great city is greater than a great piece of art. I think they are magical and I think Allen is great at making them feel it. He's obviously got a very particular way he wants them to feel and that's probably why I rebel against his version of London so much because I have my own but it's a great and important skill which I feel a film can do as well as any medium. And it's one I want to do for London. Toby McDonald who directed Je T'aime John Wayne http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3b0M-YsQjU said that he was fed up of London looking less romantic then New York and Paris. And I agree. It's so high on the list of things I want to do with film.