Episode 17 - Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen won an Oscar for writing the 2011 film “Midnight in
Paris” that pretends to assail pretension and nostalgic yearning
for different artistic eras when, at the same time, all the movie
does is romanticize different artistic eras in the most
pretentious way possible.


Aside from its bizarre 3 1⁄2-minute pre-credits opening montage
showing second-unit shots of iconic touristy spots in Paris to
its unnecessary sitcom B-story, this movie is essentially just a
time travel gimmick that plays more like an insufferable grad
student listing famous old writers and artists than interesting
historical fiction.


Owen Wilson plays a Hollywood screenwriter who wishes he were a
novelist, so he wanders the streets of Paris every night—and at
the stroke of 12 a.m.—travels back in time, where he encounters
the likes of Cole Porter, Alice B. Toklas, Josephine Baker,
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Luis
Buñuel, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, T.
S. Eliot, Henri Matisse, and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And
most of these are played by famous actors doing horrible
impressions rather than trying to embody characters.


Hey, Woody Allen, we, too, long for a different artistic era; one
where this movie doesn't exist yet.


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This episode is sponsored by Incestry.com.


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