Woody Allen won an Oscar for writing the 2011 film “Midnight in Paris” that pretends to assail pretension and nostalgic yearning for different artistic eras when, at the same time, all the movie does is romanticize different artistic eras in the most pretentious way possible.
Aside from its bizarre 3 1⁄2-minute pre-credits opening montage showing second-unit shots of iconic touristy spots in Paris to its unnecessary sitcom B-story, this movie is essentially just a time travel gimmick that plays more like an insufferable grad student listing famous old writers and artists than interesting historical fiction.
Owen Wilson plays a Hollywood screenwriter who wishes he were a novelist, so he wanders the streets of Paris every night—and at the stroke of 12 a.m.—travels back in time, where he encounters the likes of Cole Porter, Alice B. Toklas, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, T. S. Eliot, Henri Matisse, and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And most of these are played by famous actors doing horrible impressions rather than trying to embody characters.
Hey, Woody Allen, we, too, long for a different artistic era; one where this movie doesn't exist yet.
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