Finally, A Fun Woody Allen Movie

Here`s my Taki`s Magazine review of Woody Allen`s Midnight in Paris

Satire is a reactionary art form powered by contempt for the present. Although Woody Allen, now 75, has always espoused conventionally liberal views, he`s one of the last figures in American culture unaffected by the 1960s` faux egalitarianism.

Having turned 21 in 1956, Woody`s enthusiasms remain those of a cultured mid-century New Yorker. In his famous speech at the end of 1979`s Manhattan on what makes life worth living, Allen references Mozart, Flaubert, C?©zanne, Louis Armstrong, Groucho Marx, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Willie Mays, and Ingmar Bergman-in other words, nobody from the 1960s or 1970s. Like Ralph Lauren, Woody Allen has always been an old-fashioned snob.

In his delightful new romantic fantasy Midnight in Paris, Allen takes on a challenge similar to Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited: recreating a vanished golden age. To Woody, it`s the 1920s Paris of the Lost Generation modernists.

Read the whole thing there.

By the way, I`ve been reviewing Woody Allen movies for a decade so let`s see if I came up with anything new to say about him this time. Here are the old reviews:

• The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, 2001
• Melinda and Melinda, 2004
• Match Point, 2005

Reading through them after finishing this new one, I`d say, well, huh, maybe I didn`t come up with 800 words of wholly new ideas each time. But they are at least as original as Woody`s movies from the last decade!

But, don`t let that dissuade you from seeing his latest, Midnight in Paris. It`s a joy.