Midnight in Paris (2011)

Woody Allen has been steadily making movies for longer than I've been alive.  His current rate seems to be to make on movie, usually about 90 minutes or so long, every year.  Now, of course, producing a movie a year for a career as long as Allen's means many may not match up to the quality of his best films, most of which are behind him.  But every so often, he comes out with another one worth seeing, including 2011's Midnight in Paris.

It is worth noting, of course, that Midnight in Paris, though fun, is rather light fare from Allen.  It lacks the experimental story structure of Annie Hall or the deep character work of Vicki Christina Barcelona.  There isn't even the wacky slapstick of his early comedies like Sleeper.  There's comedy to Midnight in Paris, just for me mostly to make me smile as opposed to really laugh out loud.  I don't get the idea that there's much to this that's all that deep.  The movie, basically, has two things going for it.

The first is Owen Wilson.  Allen has reached an age where even he can no longer play the neurotic romantic lead to increasingly younger actresses (if he ever could post Mia Farrow).  Instead, he's cast a variety of Allen stand-ins, many of whom channel Allen's own film persona to one degree or another.  Larry David's take, in the so-so Whatever Works, basically comes across as a half-assed, or maybe whole-assed, Allen impression.  With Owen Wilson, there's a shift.  Though Wilson has some lines and scenes where he confesses to be afraid of death and making very Allen-like statements, none of this seems to wash away the screen persona of Wilson himself.  He seems more like an Owen Wilson character, something of a carefree slacker, then he does the overly analytical Woody Allen character he might have been in anyone else's hands.  Wilson's Gil seems inclined to stay in Paris like he just drifted there and seems to like the place.  Allen's own take probably would have been due to a romantic ideal that the past somehow seems superior to the future.  Yes, that is written into the character, but it comes across as more of an excuse for Wilson to enjoy the bohemian joys of Paris.

The second strength is Paris itself.  The film opens with a series of shots of Paris before breaking into the main action.  Allen's used this technique before, mostly with his native New York City in movies like Manhattan.  This establishes Paris as a character, and a fairly romantic character as it is.  The viewer can much more easily believe that so many people have fallen in love with the City of Lights, in ways that are lacking in other movies where a trip to Paris seems to be the highlight of a person's life (I'm mostly thinking here of Anne Hathaway's trip there with Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada).  It is also easy to believe that just waiting at the right spot could allow a person to visit the time period of the city that they most want to see.

The movie opens with Wilson's Gil on a trip to Paris with his fiancee and her parents.  They're there for business.  Gil is talking about moving there.  He's a frustrated writer trying to finish a novel instead of being a Hollywood hack, and Paris has a long history of attracting artists.  His wife-to-be and in-laws-to-be, sadly, are merely materialistic rightwing stereotypes, something Allen doesn't paint as full-characters as well he does Gil himself.  Included are fiancee Inez's know-it-all male friend (the kind of guy who thinks he knows more than a native French tour guide played by the former French First Lady Carla Bruni), and it becomes clear Gil is not going to be happy with this match even if he doesn't realize it yet.

Then, while out walking, he gets a ride to the 1920s, hears Cole Porter perform, meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and then Ernest Hemmingway, and starts to get some real writing advice from people he really respects but have been dead for decades.  He goes back to the present but can't get Inez to go with him, and starts up a tentative relationship with a woman (played by Marion Cotillard) who's about to break it off with Pablo Picasso.  She herself longs for another, long gone Paris in the 1890s, and it is this that leads Gil to learn a valuable lesson about the grass and when its always greener.

Midnight in Paris is a fun movie, where atmosphere adds more to the movie than anything particularly deep the characters learn.  It's hardly Allen's best, but its above average for the man this late in his career.  His best films may be behind him, but that doesn't mean he still can't produce an enjoyable flick worth 90 minutes of the viewers' time.

Saved! (2004)

My wife has over the course of our relationship introduced me to various movies she loved.  I've done the same, which means she's seen Ghostbusters and I've seen 2004's Saved!.

Saved! tells the story of a young, confused Christian girl named Mary.  Mary is part of a super-Christian cliche that seems to rule their Christian high school in a manner similar to the plastics in Mean Girls.  Mary, being raised by her single mom (Weeds' Mary-Louise Parker), is shocked, SHOCKED, to learn her chaste boyfriend Dean is actually gay.  Having been told for her whole life that being gay is a major sin, she takes it upon herself to "fix" him by having sex.  Not only does it not work, Mary's pregnant, Dean's father found his gay porn and shipped him off to the ominously-sounding Mercy House, and the cliche leader Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore) seems to be increasingly controlling over Mary and the other members, as well as Hilary Faye's wheelchair-bound brother Roland (Macaulay Culkin).

Culkin, actually, is one of the gems of this movie.  The Christian stuff seems like too-easy satire.  Culkin as a sarcastic voice of, well, not-quite reason plays off well with the school's transfer student Cassandra (Eva Amurri Martino).  Cassandra is suspected of being everything the Christians are out to oppose as stereotypically as possible.  She's said to be a stripper and Jewish!  This makes her a prime target for Hilary Faye's attempts to save a soul.  Predictably, they don't work.

As a whole, it's not an awful movie, but at the same time I don't think it's saying anything new.  The aforementioned, far superior Mean Girls goes out of its way to humanize all the sides, making the movie's ostensible villain out to be sympathetic by the end of the movie.  Saved! does not grant Hilary Faye the same treatment.  She's the bad guy, a Christian bigot and hypocrite, the only one who seems unable to learn a lesson about what it really means to be a Christian or even just a decent human being.  She's caught in her lies, loses her prestige, and crashes her van into a giant Jesus billboard.  Mary, her mother, her new boyfriend, her old boyfriend, Roland, Cassandra, even perhaps the minister, all seem to learn something about forgiveness and being a real Christian or even just a decent human being given Roland and Cassandra are more or less athiests.

As much as this movie is played for laughs, some of them a little too easy, upon seeing this all I could think of was Jesus Camp, a documentary that came out two years after Saved!  Jesus Camp takes all the stereotypes of unyielding Christian schools and shows that it is, sadly, very real, if not outright worse than anything shown in this movie.  Saved! is charming enough on its own, but knowing there's people out there really like the Hilary Faye character, only not being played for laughs, takes some of the humor off an otherwise fairly harmless movie.