Midnight in Paris 2011

I have to admit that I did not rush out to see this film mainly because my least favorite actor in the world Owen Wilson was starring in it. Ok I should clarify that, he’s one of my least favorite actors and is in a dead heat with Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler for that dubious honor. So suddenly one day it appeared in my mailbox from Netflix and I wondered did I really have it on my queue?  Well I finally watched it the other night and I can say that it was not the most painful experience I’ve ever had in the movies, in fact I quite enjoyed this little bauble from Woody Allen. Set in contemporary Paris (beautifully photographed by the way, but can anyone not beautifully photograph this city?) it stars Wilson who is the most recent stand in for Allen and plays a successful but unhappy Hollywood screenwriter. Wilson is on a holiday with the very beautiful but interchangeable   with several other young beautiful blonde actresses, Rachel McAdams. They are not exactly the couple of the year, and things get more dour for Wilson, when McAdams staunch conservative Republican parents arrive who are wonderfully played by Mimi Kennedy and Kurt Fuller. This pretty much sets up the story. Wilson who longs for yesterday, 1920’s Paris to be exact is for no given reason jolted back to that era one night and mixes it up with some of his literary heroes including Hemingway, Fitzgerald and G. Stein. Complications with his real life naturally set in, some of them quite amusing, but after a while his nocturnal wanderings for me started to become somewhat dull and expected. True there was a very funny encounter with Luis Bunuel who just doesn’t get Wilson’s idea for a movie where dinner guests can’t leave, and keeps asking but why can’t  they just walk out. I think we’ve all had longings to go back in time, to escape our frantic dull or unhappy lives I know I do, and quite often me and a close friend moan and groan  about if only we can go back in time to the city that once was New York.