 And now for something very different...
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (12A), director Woody Allen’s latest film will be shown on Thursday, March 15.
"All men fear death. It's a natural fear that consumes us all," says a character in "Midnight in Paris"... "However, when you make love with a truly great woman, one that deserves the utmost respect in this world and one that makes you feel truly powerful, that fear of death completely disappears."
“Paris is her name.
She has seduced writers for centuries, and in "Midnight in Paris" writer/director Woody Allen makes love to her with his camera, in the most poetic of ways.
Paris is a city that lends itself to daydreaming, to walking the streets and imagining all sorts of magic, a quality that Woody Allen understands perfectly.
Midnight in Paris is Allen's charming reverie about just that quality, with a screenwriter hero named Gil (Owen Wilson) who strolls the lanes of Paris with his head in the clouds and walks right into his own best fantasy.
Gil is there with his materialistic fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her unpleasant parents, taking a break from his financially rewarding but spiritually unfulfilling Hollywood career - and he can't stop thinking that all he wants to do is quit the movies, move to Paris, and write that novel he's been meaning to finish.
You know, be like his heroes in the bohemian Paris of the 1920s.
Sure enough, a midnight encounter draws him into the jazzy world of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Picasso and Dali, and an intense Ernest Hemingway, who promises to bring Gil's manuscript to Gertrude Stein for review.
Gil wakes up every morning back in the real world, but returning to his enchanted Paris proves fairly easy. In the execution of this marvellous fantasia, Allen pursues the idea that people of every generation have always romanticized a previous age as golden (this is in fact explained to us by Michael Sheen's pedantic art expert), but he also honours Gil's need to find out certain truths for himself.
The movie's on the side of gentle fantasy, and it has some literary/cinematic in-jokes that call back to the kind of goofy humor Allen created in Love and Death.
But the city glows with Allen's romantic sense of it, and Owen Wilson has just the right nice-guy melancholy to put the idea over.
A worthy entry in the Cinema of the Daydream.” - Robert Horton.
The film will be shown at Owslebury Parish Hall at 7.30 (doors open at 7 pm) and there will be a bar and ice-cream. Tickets are £6 on the night but £5.50 if bought before from Twyford Stores, Lower Upham Stores, Brambridge Shop, Liz Porteous (01962-777 342), or John Hart (01962-777 016).
|