Viewed in
2012
Formats
DVD
Premise
Owen Wilson plays an American writer in Paris who time-travels back to the 1920's to hob-nob with some of its famous citizens. A Woody Allen film.
Liked
Dialog, Hemingway.
Disliked
Odd color timing.
Thoughts
One of Allen's better titles of late.
As expected, it had many traits expected from one of his works. Fans of his will naturally enjoy its dialog-heavy humor, long takes of brainy characters rambling on and on about interesting subjects, and its charming, neurotic lead. Wilson was very well cast and inhabited a lot the director's physicality and behavior.
I really dug the premise, and I thought Allen did a great job of crafting really fun characters out of real-life figures. I'm not a bookworm, nor do I really keep up with 1920's Parisian culture, but that didn't prevent me from enjoying/understanding the situations. If you're going to dare to put Hemingway into your film, you better do a damn good job of capturing that force-of-nature, which was what the film did. Coincidentally, he was me favorite character in the film.
Much like Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it was a nice change of pace to have a Woody Allen flick set somewhere other than The Big Apple. The film grasped the romanticism and historical legacy of Paris. It was arguably one of the most visually immersive of his vast catalog.
My biggest issue was his color timing seemed to be off in the daytime shots. I'm no DP, but some of those shots lacked balance; too many similar colors in the frame, or everything over-saturated with the same level of boldness. I wanted to soak in the city, but it was hard to know what to focus on.
Midnight in Paris was more fun than I expected. It's definitely recommendable, just not sure if it should be considered cream of the crop, even in such a lackluster year.
