Marion Cotillard and Owen Wilson in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011).
New Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris premieres at Cannes
Woody Allen fans, like Bob Dylan fans, are an optimistic lot.
But where Dylan has, in recent years, been going through an artistic renaissance – which doesn’t include intelligibly singing his lyrics in concert – the Woodman continues his downward decline.
Hope springs eternal in the breast of the Allen fan, though. Although most would disagree on what was the last decent Woody flick, most would probably point to 2005′s Match Point, a crime thriller without Allen on camera, as his last good (even great) general audience-satisfying movie.
Since then it’s been unfunny turkey after unfunny turkey, although if you look hard enough you can probably find proponents for Scoop and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Good luck, however, finding anyone with much good to say about Cassandra’s Dream, Whatever Works (with that bore from Curb Your Enthusiasm), or last year’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
You might say we’re overdue for a truly smart, funny Woody Allen flick. Unfortunately, Midnight in Paris, which just opened the Cannes Film Festival, probably isn’t it.
Watch – Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (movie trailer):
In his review, the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw calls Midnight in Paris “an amiable amuse-bouche to begin the Cannes festival feast: sporadically entertaining, light, shallow, self-plagiarising” (the full Peter Bradshaw Guardian review of Midnight in Paris). To be fair to the movie, though, Bradshaw seems to have his own weird idiosyncracies, and I’m not sure how much to trust someone who writes, “The camera adds 10 pounds, they say, but this rule does not apply to the fashionably thin Carla Bruni [Sarkozy, who has a cameo]. I wonder how Carla’s sister Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi would have played the part.” Uhm, here’s one answer: who gives a fuck?
The movie stars Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams and Marion Cotillard. Midnight in Paris opens June 3 in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.
