caitri | Movie Review: Midnight in Paris

Okay, so full disclosure: I am so totally the target geek audience for this movie. When I was sixteen, I read A Moveable Feast and it left its mark on me (full-full disclosure: I own three copies of that book: a beaten paperback I took to Paris and read and reread while I was there; the recent "restored" edition by Hemingway's third wife; a first edition in dust jacket). I also watched Highlander the Series while growing up, which was its own kind of love note to the city.

So Owen Wilson is a stand-in for a young Woody Allen, and he does a great job channeling an insecure dreamer. He is inexplicably engaged to an annoyingly shallow fiance, and joined by her painfully WASPy parents, and this guy his fiance is clearly enamored with and his gf. And after too much of this, he gets a bit sloshed at a wine tasting and ends up in a car to the 20s where he first meets Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Wilson's little-boyish O!M!G! face when he cottons on to who he's witg is worth the price of admission alone. so, on a succession of midnight rides, he ends up running around with Hemingway, Dali, Picasso, Stein and Toklas, Barnes, Bunuel, and more. And it is. All SO. MUCH. FUN.

It's very quickly predictable, and there's rathermore file footage of the city than you'd like, but Wilson is so completely adorable that you can't help liking him even when he's doing something dickish--and he quickly does his damnedest to keep others from his own mistakes, so he kind of makes up for it. This is easily the sweetest not-romance I've seen in a while; I'm totally getting the DVD when it comes out.