Notes on the Best Picture Nominees: Midnight in Paris

I wanted to like this film much more than I did. It looks wonderful on paper: modern writer gets transported mysteriously to 1920s Paris. But in execution it seems slight, more like checking off a list of famous artists to be found on the Left Bank in the ‘20s than anything more probing. The scenes set in the past are too vignette-like (camera pans to Buñuel, camera pans to Dalí, camera pans to Hemmingway, etc.), and those set in the present are just dull. In a way, the characters of the past are too interesting for the small amount of time they’re given, and those of the present are too boring for their greater amount of screen time. Maybe if it were half an hour longer this would have been a better film. It is nice to see Woody Allen returning to the fantasy of some of his earlier films like The Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig, but I wish he had combined that with the maturity of some of his more recent films.