Midnight in Paris DVD Release Date
Midnight in Paris DVD Release Date
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 marvelous 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 honors 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.The film is guilty of the slackness that Allen’s latter-day directing has sometimes shown, and the underwritten roles for McAdams and Marion Cotillard are better acted than written. 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 ( Midnight in Paris DVD Release Date )
Actors: Alison Pill, Rachel McAdams, Owen Wilson
Directors: Woody Allen
Format: NTSC
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Run Time: 94 minutes
Midnight in Paris DVD Release Date
France : 12 October 2011 – Buy Midnight in Paris DVD
Midnight in Paris DVD Review
“Midnight in Paris” is the story of Gil (Owen Wilson), a Hollywood screenwriter dissatisfied with his career, visiting Paris with his snippy fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her dreadful parents (Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy). One night, wandering alone through the Rive Gauche, he sees an ancient Peugeot limousine; the passengers stop and invite him in. This is Gil’s entry into the Paris of his dreams–the Paris of the Twenties, in which Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill, Tom Hiddleston) and others cavort in a magical city of abundant promise and possibility. There is even more promise and possibility in the person of Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful fashion designer and artists’ groupie with a passion for the Belle Epoque of Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Allen doesn’t try to make “Midnight in Paris” anything more than an airy little souffle of a movie. But the film is far more optimistic than any that Allen has made recently, and he sustains its magical mood brilliantly. (He grabs us with the opening few minutes, a wordless mini-travelogue of Paris accompanied by a lovely, slow Dixieland blues.) Owen Wilson brings a joyous, puppy-dog eagerness to the lead role, and the rest of the cast is equally fine; Michael Sheen has some wonderful moments as the sort of pompous pseudo-intellectual Woody has been skewering at least since “Annie Hall.” “Midnight in Paris” has a pointed yet painless moral–that it’s up to us to create our own Golden Age, right here and now–and envelops its viewers in a lingering, enchanted glow. Midnight in Paris DVD Release Date
