Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

A recent release on Netflix, when I picked this movie I knew that it was vaguely popular, but more so went into it because it was only an hour and a half. I don’t tend to veer towards Owen Wilson movie and so I found myself pleasantly surprised to have really enjoyed Midnight in Paris.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the movie revolves around a Screenwriter who has written a novel. Currently in Paris on vacation with his fiance, he falls in love with the city, its classic charms and the history that soaks its streets. Perhaps born of his intense wanting from Paris, he finds himself in what he believes to be it’s greatest era, the 1920’s, surrounded by all the greats from Hemmingway to Dali.

The movie explores Golden Age Thinking which is the idea that a former era to the one you’re currently experiencing was better. It’s okay to be enjoy the past, as long as you don’t get lost in it and forget to live and experience the present.

Midnight in Paris was unexpected, funny and wholesome. It sparked all the right romanticism of the arts, literature, philosophy, whimsy and adventure of our expectations of the past.

I almost forgot that soundtrack. Those classic notes of the past framed wonderfully by Sydney Bechet’s Si Tu Vois Ma Mere had me scouring the web and trying to justify buying a gramaphone.

Perhaps due to my own sentimentalities of the roaring twenties (though I’d choose New York over Paris) and my love of old literaries, Midnight in Paris is a movie I can see myself rewatching should I need to restore my passion for the written word.