MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

title: MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
year: 2011
cast: Owen Wilson
rating: *1/2

Owen Wilson is a flustered Hollywood scriptwriter/wannabe novelist on a trip to Paris with his agitated fiancé (with clichéd right wing parents and clichéd left wing pseudo-intellectual friends): Troubled by perpetual indifference, he ventures alone into the night and is too-easily taken back to the 1930s. There he meets the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, and the every-artist den mother, Gertrude Stein.

Hemingway speaks like a robot reciting Hemingway, while Fitzgerald flaunts his drunkenly troubled, airhead wife, Zelda. Picasso’s in love with a fickle beauty while Owen Wilson, displaying his usual surfer deadpan, as a person thrust into another era acts as if nothing’s going on – and that’s the problem. Woody Allen treats time travel like walking to a corner store, making Paris, the inspiration for a film spanning two (actually three) time periods, feel commonplace; while the actors portraying the famous inhabitants seem like dullards at a costume party. Although one conversation (Wilson and his love interest discussing the importance of nostalgia) does effectively engage the theme of seeking another era for inspiration, so perhaps Woody Allen can transport himself back to the seventies and eighties – he might be able to relearn the art of movie/magic, something he, pulling the same rabbit from an old hat, hasn't effectively concocted for many years.... A more overrated film this reviewer has yet to experience.