Drifting Clouds Cinema Blog: "Nuts4R2 Reviews Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris"

Midnight In Paris

We’ll Always Have Paris!

Midnight In Paris 2011 Spain/USA

Directed by Woody Allen

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Spoilers abound in this review.

I don’t often get to see Woody Allen films these days but, when I was a kid and then a teen, he was one of my heroes.Stardust Memories was one of my favourite of his movies, although I loved the majority of his work (including his “early funny ones”) and I also liked to listen to his stand up material.

These days I don’t get to see his work much because, frankly, it usually only appears on local cinema screens for one week over here in the UK if you’re lucky, if at all. ForMidnight In Paris, I’d missed the week it did at my local cinema but travelled into the heart of London to catch it down there while it was still around.

Midnight In Paris belongs in Woody’s slightly more outrageous “fantasy” work if I had to try to place it or position it with any of his other movies. It’s like the plays he was writing in the 60s and 70s which had a certain fantasy element which the audience really needs to buy into and suspend disbelief with. These movies are now more prominent within his body of work but I guess he started this kind of fantasy cinema with his movie The Purple Rose Of Cairoand it’s very much a signature of his more wilder flights of fancy that he tends not to be at all interested in the mechanics which make his fantasies work on screen (or whatever venue they are in - stage play at the theatre, script in a book) and some younger audiences these days, who seem to be obsessed with the intricate plot devices to make their fantasy worlds more “believable”, may have trouble with this fact.

For me though, it’s always a breath of fresh air that Allen doesn’t bother to explain his worlds... you just have to accept them or not and move on. Midnight In Paris is a case in point.

The film stars Owen Wilson as Gil, a struggling writer who is about to marry his sweetheart but, as you will probably guess from the earliest stages of this film, he’s going to be left seriously questioning that relationship before long. While on holiday in Paris he finds a portal to the past, whereby if he waits at midnight in a certain spot, a car will arrive for him and whisk him away for a few hours back in time to 1920s Paris where he falls in with the likes of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter etc. Hanging out with the literary set gives him the confidence he needs as a writer and, when he falls in love with Pablo Picasso’s latest lover, played by Marion Cotillard, he realises that he can’t continue on with his headlong rush into marriage (especially after Hemingway clues him up that his fiance is having an affair). After he and his new 1920’s sweetheart travel back in time to meet Toulouse-Lautrec, and he sees the effect this has on her, he also finally sees that he can’t live his life in the past and that the present is always somebody else’s golden age and that he needs to live in it while it’s here.

As usual with a Woody Allen film, the direction, cinematography, script, performances and general execution of this production are all top notch and I wouldn’t expect anything less from this genius of contemporary American cinema. Woody Allen is one of the true artists of film and, while it’s easy to forget his genius due to the lack of exposure his films tend to get these days, it’s still a basic truth that the brush strokes he paints his celluloid canvass with are as relevant today as they always have been. And the strength and truth of his work is not something which can be brushed off lightly, even though his films usually have an intrinsic lightness or fluffiness in their demeanour (if not their subtext).

And frankly, you’ve got to love any film where the main protagonist hangs out in a bar with young Man Ray, Bunuel and a rhinoceros obsessed Salvador Dali (in a great little cameo by Adrien Brody) and then, when he later meets up with Bunuel again, gives him the idea for The Exterminating Angel. What a great little film this latest slice of Woody Allen’s brain turned out to be. I’m so glad I made the trip into London to see it... and I’ll definitely be picking this one up on DVD and giving it another watch next year. Great movie. Nice idea. Treat yourself to an hour or two in the company of the smart set of 1920’s Paris. A definite recommendation from this reviewer on this one!

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The Great Acting Blog: "The Future Of Acting"

“we have to be optimistic. The moment actors start thinking otherwise, they're dead. You simply have to believe you have a future.” - Peter O'Toole.

 

Peter O'Toole is a god of acting, he is a great actor, his performance in Becket is one of my favourite of all time, so when he speaks, I listen. However, I was quite shocked by the statement above, it never occurred to me that somebody as fabulously successful and bravura as O'Toole ever had to worry about having a future as an actor, certainly I would never have guessed that he would ever have had to place his chips on being optimistic.

 

I've never really liked “optimism”, it's similar to “being positive”, it just seems desperate, as though we are powerless and can only accomplish anything because of luck, or because of some outside force doing us a favour. I much prefer to try to see things as they really are, then plot a course of action in response to the conclusions of my analysis, and proceed from there. Optimism is linked to the frustrations of the casting process, where the actor is having to appeal to someone, whilst knowing there are dozens of other actors lined up behind him, waiting to do exactly the same thing – then after the casting, the actor is left hoping he is the one who will be picked, and if he is passed over on this occasion, then he must hope something else turns-up, and the process starts all over again. The actor copes with being demeaned in this way only because it is the accepted norm. The point is however, we can easily see how the actor is reduced to sitting around trying to be “optimistic” about the future. The trouble is, optimism is only a hop, skip and a jump away from wishful thinking, and wishful thinking is, we know, the opposite of hard thinking – but wishful thinking is what keeps people volutarily participating in a system which does not necessarily serve their own best interests, ie: “I have absolutely no control over what is happening to me, but I'm sure something'll turn up”. Wishful thinking is thinking that one day you'll have a career like, well, like Peter O'Toole, even though you may not possess the capability to actually make it happen. As I mentioned in my blog on Why Actors Quit, without a concrete and energising goal (and for the goal to be concrete and energizing, accomplishing it needs to be within the actor's power), the actor will not be able to overcome the obstacles he will inevitably encounter – he needs powerful reasons to keep fighting – optimism, positive thinking, wishful thinking, self-help mantras, vague hope, are not concrete, and they are not energizing, they may, like cigarettes, seem to offer momentary relief, but ultimately they are empty and lead to self-deception

.

 

For my own view, the acting world has changed radically from the days when O'Toole was coming up. The last 10 years has seen an explosion in the number of people going into acting, and arguably there has been a dimunition in the volume of work available. Like the rest of our culture, getting a decent education and working hard is no longer enough. We are moving into an era when eveyone needs to be an entrepeneur, and that includes actors. Infact, in the case of acting, I think we will see the emergence of more and more “actor-auteurs”, wherby the actor is the unmistakable author of the work, such as Charlie Chaplin or Woody Allen. This will happen largely because of the reason I mentioned above, that there is just so much more traffic on the old career paths than there used to be and actors will be forced to be more innovative, but also it will happen because it's now doable: the cost of production has been coming down and down and down to the point where a professional quality feature film can be produced with a literally zero budget, and then we have the emergence of micro-distribution, where an audience can be found and nurtured. The actor doesn't need to believe he has a future, the actor needs to create one for himself.

The Great Acting Blog: "Actor As Auteur - Woody Allen"

 

 

“the idea of an actor who becomes the writer, the director, the true auteur, who places himself at the centre of that cinematic universe consistently through a number of films so that ultimately the persona does enter the culture” - Annette Insdorf on Woody Allen

 

They say the films of Woody Allen are an acquired taste, that not everybody likes them, certainly it's true that his films are not considered to be financially successfully in the conventional sense. As a kid, I loathed the Allen films I occasionally stumbled upon on television, finding them to be tedious and unfunny. It wasn't until years later that I became hooked on his irony, via Deconstructing Harry and especially the scene where he is arguing with his wife (played by Kirsty Alley) because she is the obstacle to him seeing more women. Allen has also been prolific, producing 48 films in 46 years, an impressive output, and even more so when we consider that Allen has made all of his films in the commercial sector and with complete artistic freedom, no financier goes anywhere near his productions – people talk about independent filmmkers, Woody Allen is the real thing.

However, I was piqued recently when I learned that Woody Allen doesn't take a break in between films, ie – when he finishes editing one film, he sits down at his typewriter the next day and starts to write the script for the next. No holiday, no chilling out in Ibiza, just a continuation of the work. This consistent work-rate does go someway to explaining the consistent quality and sheer volume of Allen's work, but does not tell us the full story. Afterall, what drives a man to write, direct and star in feature films for almost 50 years (and counting)? That's not an easy question to answer. Allen has little interest in critical acclaim, but clearly he must have a great love for his work – you cannot dedicate yourself to something in the way Allen does without loving it – he must love (and be pre-occupied by) going through the process of and completing a new work, and he must enjoy seeing the effect his work has upon an audience (although I don't believe that Allen is obssessed with popularity). We also know that Allen possesses a pre-occupiation with death, and has an overwhelming consciousness that life is finite, and therefore he may simply be trying to get as much as much as possible done before he goes. Another clue might be Allen's recent comment that he is still searching for the delivery of a cinematic masterpiece (many consider Manhatten to be one, but Allen himself does not), and so his prolific output could be the result of an obsession with mastering his art, an addiction to constantly refining and strengthening his aesthetic – certainly he has the creative engine for such an undertaking.

Whatever drives Woody Allen, his accomplishment has been astonishing, and is certainly something actors can look at as inspiring and worth aiming for. Woody Allen has worked his entire life on material he loves and with total artistic freedom. He understands that his performances and his skills and talents do not exist in order to flatter so-called “gatekeepers”, but to serve the particular film he is working on, and further explore whatever artistic lines of enquiry pre-occupy him at any given time. That doesn't seem like a bad way to live life .