Midnight in Paris

At first pitch, Midnight in Paris must have seemed like a throwaway idea, a one page doodle conceived for the "Shouts and Murmurs" section of The New Yorker. A Hollywood screenwriter working on a novel about a nostalgia shop finds himself transported back to the Paris of the 1920s, where he hobnobs with the greatest literary and artistic figures of the 20th century. Only Woody Allen could bring this premise to life as both parody and nostalgia, highlighting the absurdity and magic of the situation with equal measure.

During what some have called his recent "revival", which others have bemoaned as The Scarlett Johannsen phase, Woody's films have found a new audience by de-emphasizing the director's trademark autobiographical elements. Midnight in Paris finds Allen back in a comfortable navel-gazing position, although using Owen Wilson' navel is far more pleasing to the eye. Wilson' cornfed charisma brings an earnest reading to some of the classic Allen neuroses, as he talks of chest pains and witch hunts. Wilson plays Gil Pender, a successful screenwriter on vacation with his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her uber-conservative parents. Gil is loving every second in Paris, which is dramatized in a nearly 4-minute opening sequence of street shots, beginning at dawn and ending late in the evening. He talks of moving there, of drinking in the places where Joyce drank, of finally getting back to "higher" art, namely, his novel in progress. Inez, distracted by a chance meeting with her pretentious ex-lover Paul (a wonderfully obnoxious Michael Sheen), only wants to discuss interior decoration for the couple's new home in Malibu (about as un-Paris as any location imaginable).

Desperate to get away from all this talk of the future and Paul's incessant, misinformed lectures on Rodin, Gil wanders down a dark street late at night, collapsing drunk on a stoop (always a good start for an adventure). An ancient Peugeot drifts before him, and a group of revelers in period dress have whisked him off to a party for Jean Cocteau, complete with Cole Porter on the piano and a chatty Zelda Fitzgerald belting champagne cocktails. Soon Hemingway is asking to box with Gil, and Gertrude Stein is giving him notes on his novel. He even runs into the trio of Man Ray, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, who are nonchalant about Gil's time-traveling. Of course it all makes sense to them, Gil whines, "you guys are surrealists!"

Whether Gil is hallucinating all this due to a bad batch of escargot is irrelevant - these razor-thin characterizations of long-dead geniuses are not meant as a Bill and Ted-style sendup. Midnight in Paris desperately wants to believe in its own spell - it returns us to the territory as The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which downtrodden Mia Farrow gets to spend a few days with her favorite movie character. It's a common experience to pass through Minnesota and think about Fargo, or visiting Mount Rushmore to remember the climax of North by Northwest. The same goes for the association between Hemingway and bullfights. For Gil, Paris is art, it is creative genius. Paris represents what he longs for, what he cannot get from Inez or his apparent success in Hollywood.

The central conflict of Midnight in Paris is set up by the increasingly annoying Paul, who calls Gil's book a classic example of "Golden Age Thinking", that the previous age must have been better than our own. Allen has certainly been guilty of this in the past, with nostalgic films like Cairo, Radio Days or Zelig. He has also paid homage to Tolstoy in Love and Death, Fellini in Celebrity and Stardust Memories, and Bergman in Husbands and Wives. There is also the obligatory scene in many of his films where a characters emerges bleary-eyed from a repertory theater. Midnight in Paris moves past mere romanticization and into full-blown experience. The jazz-age adventures are enticing, but all of us, including Gil, realize them to be fantasy, unless we accept Faulkner's sentiment: "the past is never dead. It's not even past."

The debate over the Golden Age aside, Midnight in Paris may be Woody Allen taking an inventory of his own career, and holding it up against some of the most revered figures in the history of culture. Gil has produced so many scripts it seems even he has trouble telling them apart - surely there are portions, though not the entirety, of Allen's career that must feel this way for the 77 year old auteur. He has himself said comedy is perpetually forced to sit at the kid's table, yet quietly, has amassed a catalogue of moving films both light and heavy that will stand the test of time. They are what will ultimately secure Allen's legacy in the pantheon of cinema. There are at once moments of brutal honesty and indescribable magic in Midnight in Paris that will make us yearn for Woody when he's gone, and try, fruitlessly, to find his equal.

The Vault #72: Taste of Cherry

One afternoon in the dusty outskirts of Tehran, Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) searches desperately for someone to assist him in committing suicide. Yet each man he finds recoils at the procedure, which requires them to cover Badii's corpse with dirt, after the man himself has succumb to an overdose of sleeping pills. Badii has already picked out a spot; he has already dug the whole. He lays out his plan three separate times, taking the slow winding route up the hillside to his proposed final resting place. He is undeterred when each man refuses to carry out the plan - he simply keeps looking. There are, after all, many unemployed men wandering the streets at this hour - surely one of them is desperate enough to take the man's offer, and his money.

Here is a man wealthy enough to drive a range rover, who appears in good health, and he wishes to exit this world as quickly as possible. And on top of that, ritualistically - it is after all, only for the sake of Allah that the body be covered at all. This conundrum, that suicide cannot be a truly solo act, forms the entirety of the conflict in Abbas Kiarostami's 1997 Palm D'or winner Taste of Cherry. Badii's drooping face certainly communicates a deep dread, both of his present predicament and the existential one he may face with the end of his existence, but the true nature of either is never truly hashed out. We have no idea why Badii has gotten in his car that day and set out to find a helper - we begin already in the car, the errand already mid-offing.

Taste of Cherry is a revolt against traditional narrative, eschewing motivation and explanation in favor of immediate urgency. Most films attempt to evoke a particular setting, construct a world that the characters inhabit. Kiarostami's camera rarely looks out upon its surroundings; instead it is forever trained on Badii, or his car. While this might go a long way in personalizing his plight, the actual effect is one of an animal in a zoo. The long we look, the more obvious it is that Badii is in a man-made enclosure, his particular terror is one of captivity, one imposed by the film itself.

Italian neorealism, with its nonprofessional actors and improvised plots, was the cinematic equivalent of modernism in literature, introducing a new level of reality and consciousness to the cinema. Filmmakers like Kiarostami, Michael Haneke and Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) have flipped the script, applying Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to storytelling - the closer we look, the more inscrutable the material becomes. All we can say with certainty about Taste of Cherry is that it explores the value of life, if only on a theoretical level.

Yet at the climax, with Badii awaiting his death in the hole, Kiarostami pulls the rug from beneath us once again - Badii's life is no more an actual human life than Vito Corleone's. The final moments show the film crew recording sound on the same hill, but now everything is in bloom. As one character says earlier in the film, "God gives us different fruits in every season" - now the once desolate hill is verdant, alive, populated by soldiers and camera men. Ershadi is off to the side, having a smoke with some crew members. What preceded may have been depressing, but we must remember, as does Badii, there is always another way of looking at a situation. For example, if not through the camera eye, just behind it.

Super 8

A group of kids with shaggy haircuts race around Anywhere, USA, on their bikes, one step ahead of a shady government cover-up. Later, an idle vehicle is attacked by someone or something hungry for human flesh. Eventually, the townspeople gather and gaze to the sky as they are bathed in an ethereal blue light. You are not watching Stephen Spielberg's Cecil B. Demille Award clip reel; instead, you've purchased one of the many tickets available for JJ Abrams' Super 8, the most refreshingly unoriginal picture to come out of Hollywood in decades. This isn't just a paean to the old master of children's entertainment, either; Spielberg can be found right there in the credits, listed officially as a producer, unofficially as a "mentor".

Fanboys in certain quarters have been awaiting this film since the first mysterious trailer, which simply showed reflections of mysterious explosions in the lens of the titular recording device. Abrams, known best as the producer of Lost, has made a habit of keeping his projects shrouded in secrecy. In the case of Cloverfield, the emperor had no clothes - this is not the case with Super 8, which is thankfully shot with a dolly-mounted camera and 35mm stock. The need for secrecy is unclear however - anyone who's seen E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind should take the cues early on that an alien is involved, and it probably is misunderstood. Of course, Abrams and Spielberg seem to be pushing their chips to the middle in the hope that no one under 30 has seen or remembers those films.

Joe Lamb and his friends are making a movie (how appropriate), in the anachronistically popular zombie genre. One night, with his best friend and director Charles griping about "production value", the boys and their friends set out to shoot a scene at the town train station, little more than a platform. They are accompanies by Alice, the romantic interest, played by Elle Fanning, poised to upend her sister. As the train comes by, making the scene "real" and "alive", it derails in a deafening series of collisions and explosions. When the boys run, the camera drops to the ground, still running, and possibly (read: does) record invaluable evidence that something mysterious, nay, otherworldly may be afoot.

The general feeling of what follows is pure fun; the small town atmosphere of Spielberg films like Jaws and 1941, filtered through other Spielberg spinoffs like The Goonies and Gremlins. There are a bevy of thin characterizations, from Alice's alcoholic father to a nervous woman in a town-hall meeting worried the Soviets may be to blame. For a while, the kids have a "show must go on" attitude and continue with the filming of the movie, even as the crucial reel is being developed. That is, until people start disappearing and the town is evacuated by the evil military. It's around this point that the 80s kitsch slides to the background and we are reminded Abrams isn't merely making an homage to Spielberg - he is literally making a Spielberg movie. Which means it's time for us to all learn a valuable lesson.

Following Quentin Tarantino's lead, Hollywood has produced a lot of mainstream throwbacks lately. Pineapple Express began as an ironic take on buddy-action movies like 48 Hours and Midnight Run, then descended to actual male bonding and gunfights in the final act. The Expendables took the mirroring one step further, when Sylvester Stallone revisited the muscles and machine guns of his youth. Super 8 is something different - it's hardly self aware at all. One would expect a cameo by Henry Thomas or Richard Dreyfuss, or a movie theatre showing Close Encounters; instead there's a cast of unknown character actors, as though the film is trying to fool future generations. When it most desperately needs to wink at the audience, assure us that it understands its mechanics as the slickest of mimicry, Super 8 refuses.

If for the train-wreck scene alone, Super 8 is Abrams' best work to date. It delivers laughs, thrills and excitement efficiently, and moves along at a breakneck pace. Unfortunately, as with the worst of Spielberg's films, the sugar rush wears off long before the credits roll, and the films most "meaningful" moments are deadened by the unshakeable feeling that we've seen this all before. In a year where we are being bombarded with Transformers 3, Pirates of the Carribean 5, Harry Potter 7 and two more Marvel comic book movies, the marketing for Super 8 promised the most innovative and unexpected blockbuster of the summer. Instead, it's the most familiar of them all.

The Vault #71: The Roaring Twenties

Though released in 1939, The Roaring Twenties feels the needs to educate the audience about its setting as though it took place in Ancient Rome. The film opens with newsreel footage, and this motif will continue throughout. Unlike the earlier gangster pictures of the decade, this one take place squarely in the past, and assumes an appropriately novelistic tone - "While our characters rose and fell, so did the rest of the country." This brings the stars, Bogart and Cagney down to our level in some ways - each is just a poor schlub trying to make his way in the world.

Unlike the pre-code films that form gangster canon (Scarface, Little Caesar and The Public Enemy), The Roaring Twenties was not released during Prohibition. Therefore it was divorced from the ongoing war on crime, bereft of didactic slant an cartoonish overstatement. Where Cagney previously appeared cackling and shoving grapefruit where it certainly did not belong, here we find him at first hungry and downtrodden. Eddie is a WWI veteran who gets a job as a cabdriver, which soon has him making "deliveries", which soon has him thrown in jail with fast-talking club owner Panama Smith (Gladys George). Even when he does make some connections and moves up in the world, he remains blissfully ignorant of the harm he may be causing to innocent people.

If it can be said that Cagney has a softer side in The Roaring Twenties, this can be credited to director Raoul Walsh, who to this point had made his name on Westerns and women's films, most famously Sadie Thompson, in which a fallen woman played by Gloria Swanson seeks a fresh start. In his first foray into the gangster genre, he makes sure to keep Cagney well-insulated. He never kills anyone on screen as he rises to power - these duties are left to his war buddy George Hally (Bogart). The earlier gangster films villainized their protagonists so the audience eventually rooted for their downfall. Eddie's comes well before the final reel, in the stock market crash.

To continue the mood of ambivalence, Eddie is torn between to romantic interests: the fiery Panama, and the innocent Jean (Priscilla Lane). A good portion of the first act is spent with Eddie gazing at a picture of Jean dressed as a Turkish dancing girl; he presumes her to be a woman of the world. When he arrives at her home after the war and finds the costume was for a high school play, he tells her to grow up for a few years. He is trapped in a nostalgic whirlpool for the rest of the film, drawn back to an image that never existed, even as the real Jean falls in love with Eddie's straight-laced attorney. All of Eddie's striving and empire-building is for a girl who disappeared long ago - there's more than a whiff of Gatsby in him.

The Roaring Twenties is not a gangster film; rather it is a drama set in the world of the gangster. Cagney doesn't meet his end cackling in a hail of police gunfire (he and Walsh would save that for when they re-teamed on White Heat). He goes down trying to do the right thing for Jean and her family, at the hands of his best friend. The flappers and bathtub gin are distant memories by the end of the film; Eddie dies in a bum's clothes on the steps of a church, Panama the only witness. For all of his deaths, this is Cagney's most famous - perhaps because he is allowed the most dignity in this pieta pose. This is the one instance where the audience is not happy to see him go, the moment he truly feels like an unluckier version of ourselves, a cautionary tale from history rather than a monstrous cartoon of the present.