"Midnight in Paris"

Ahhhh, Paris. Je t'aime Paris. When I was 16, I walked around Paris in the Springtime and, without realizing it, allowed myself to fall in love. Woody Allen recently released a movie that reminded me of my love. While I am not a Woody Allen fan, and sat in my seat cringing in preparation for something off-colour or crude, this was a fantastically made picture and it was clean.

"Midnight in Paris" drops you into the middle of a vacation. He's writing a novel and having a tiny crisis over who he is as a writer; she's shopping and encouraging him to stay where the paycheck is. You wonder how these two people ever made it past their first date. As the story unfolds, you realize that he is in love with the past and the ideal that he has invented in his head--about all things in his life. One night, a beautiful Peugeot pulls up and whisks him away to Paris during the Roaring 20's, a time he believes to be the ideal to be alive. He meets all his literary heroes, musical legends, painters, and a beautiful woman. If only....

It is in conversing with this beautiful woman that he realizes that while one can be in love with what was, there is always someone who lived what was who is also in love with what was. If only I had been born 20 years earlier. If only I had lived during La Belle Epoque. If only....If only....If only. Then he realizes, as all of us must do at some point in our lives, it is alright to enjoy and appreciate what is past, but we must be in love with what is, here and now. We must take off our rose-coloured glasses and see the world in all its brilliantly shaded colours and chiaroscuro.

It is a beautifully rendered and cleverly written story. It's out of theaters here where I live, but if it isn't where you live, go see it. I don't think you'll be disappointed. Eventually, it will be out on DVD if that's the only way to see it.