I can’t believe that people aren’t outraged and insulted by Midnight in Paris. I cannot fathom how it got an Oscar for screenplay. What a pandering hollow fin du monde piece of crap. It pretends to culture but ends up merely reassuring people who don’t read that their education is adequate. The whole TS Eliot scene is a setup for a throwaway line about coke spoons. Popular culture hits a new low.
I cringed when Degas and Renoir approached Lautrec’s table. The scene with Dali and Bunuel and Man Ray was ludicrous, wooden. Hemingway was a caricature – that’s it, it’s a fucking cartoon of modern culture remembering and valuing high culture and people are buying it. Allen must be laughing himself sick.
And Owen Wilson’s impersonation of Woody, bumbling, hapless. (And isn’t it amazing how the beautiful girls still just appear at the right moment and fall madly for this same neurotic loser?) I HATE that Gil’s screenplays are meant to suggest Allen’s. And that THIS awful movie, this piece of crap, is supposed to be about making serious art! Pandering to the lowest common denominator, shameful caricature, simplistic wooden acting, stilted dialogue, every cliché in the book. The only bearable part was the opening sequence with jazz music. The acting was dreadful, clichéd, flat, has he totally lost his mind? Has the academy lost its mind? He’s making fools of us and we don’t even know it.
I stopped watching Woody Allen movies after he seduced his stepdaughter and married her. I decided then and there that I was not interested in anything he had to say. Yes, I know we must separate the artist from the art, but I also owe it to myself to make choices about what, to use Margaret Laurence’s words, to allow “houseroom in my skull”. It has been at least ten years and I have kept my vow. But my friends talked me into Midnight in Paris – said I’d love it.
I HATED this movie. I despised it. Because it despises the viewer. It does. It despises, and it is despicable.
