Midnight in Paris review

 Number 608 on the top 1000 films of all time is Woody Allen's fantasy comedy 'Midnight in Paris.'

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a struggling Hollywood writer holidaying in Paris with his nagging fiancee Inez (Rachel Mcadams.) Pender seeks respite with midnight walks in Paris' back streets where he discovers he can travel back to 1920's Paris and meet the famous writers and artists like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Picasso who once called Paris home. The film's supporting cast includes Adrian Brody, Tom Hiddleston, Kathy Bates and Marion Cotillard.

This is the eighth Woody Allen film I've watched. By now everybody knows that I do not like Woody Allen films. All too often I find them to be pretentious, unfunny or just stupid. I was not expecting to like Midnight in Paris, but by some minor miracle I did. I'm still confused now.

For starters it was actually funny. I actually laughed out loud more than once instead of just sitting stony-faced throughout the whole film. In the past, I have found Woody Allen films to be all set-up and no punchline. But here, I was laughing in the first few minutes.

I enjoyed the playfullness that Owen Wilson brought to the role and the whimsical element that the time travel brought to the plot. The mechanics of it weren't explained. Nor did they need to be. To have done so would have only complicated a film that didn't need to be. Similar to The Purple Rose of Cairo, the time travel was considered more as magic realism rather than convoluted science-fiction. It was treated as established fact of the universe.

It helped the characters weren't insufferable faux-intellectuals except for Inez's faux-academic friend Paul (Michael Sheen) but he was intentionally supposed to be insufferable. In contrast, Gil and Inez were both down-to-earth characters. Gil wasn't pretending to be anything else, but a writer looking for inspiration. Inez wasn't pretending to be anything else, but a tired girlfriend bored with her fiancee's strange antics. There was no pretentiousness with Wilson and Mcadams giving grounded performances. It helped that Owen Wilson is a lot more likeable than Woody Allen who often stars in his own film where he always plays himself.

If there is one thing that has always impressed me with Woody Allen films, it is the cinematography and set design. I loved the 1920's Paris scenes that truly captured the excess and opulence of the jazz era. The likes of Tom Hiddleston, Adrian Brody and the always terrific Kathy Bates also did well in bringing their respective characters to life.

The film touches on themes of nostalgia and looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. Yet the film ends on the note of Gil resisting the temptation to stay in the past. Instead he returns to the present but with a new perspective. It's not so much the grass is always greener on the other side, but where you water it. Although Allen often likes to include some type of philosophical message in his films, these often fall flat. This was NOT the case here. I was not expecting that at all.

And I wasn't expecting to actually enjoy a Woody Allen film, but sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction.

La Vie En Rose review

 Number 603 on the top 1000 films of all time is the musical biopic La Vie En Rose.

This French film tells the story of famed singer Edith Piaf, otherwise known as the Little Sparrow. Marion Cotillard stars as Piaf. From her impoverished childhood to her untimely death, we see the rise and fall of France's national chanteuse. 

I didn't like this film. It wasn't just that the subject matter didn't interest me - I am neither French nor a baby boomer so Edith Piaf has never been something that's high on my music list. Call me a culturally ignorant millennial, but c'est comme ca. I didn't like the way the story was told. It seemed random, chaotic and very incohesive. Like many other films it is told in a non-linear fashion and regularly plays around in time. 

It opens up on Edith as an adult and then cuts to her childhood and then to her as an adolescent, but whereas with other films there is a logic to this time-jumping, I failed to see any logic here. It was like the film-makers had realised at the last minute they had forgotten something important and stuffed it in anywhere they could. For example, near the end of the film we find out she has a child who died from Meningitis. We find this out in a flashback, but why was something of this magnitude not revealed until so late in the film? Not to mention all the numerous flash-forwards where we see Edith's ailing health.

And I certainly don't mean to diminish Marion Cotillard's performance. She won the Best Actress Oscar for this role - just one of six actors to win the award for a non-English speaking role - and she was good as Piaf. We bore witness to the many trials and tribulations of Piaf's life and Cotillard took us through her emotions well. And I think she embodied the character well. Reportedly she shrunk her already petite 5"6 frame to reach Piaf's diminutive 4"11 role. And I do remember reading somewhere that she worked with a dialect coach to capture Piaf's speaking voice as best as she could, although all the singing was dubbed by French singer Jil Aigrot.

Maybe this film would have been better suited to a lover of classic French music and not a philistine like me, but c'est la vie. Non, je ne regrette rien.