Out Of The Be-Bop Retro-Jazz Age 2000s Night- Woody Allen’s “Midnight In Paris”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris

DVD Review

Midnight In Paris, starring Owen Wilson, Rachael McAdams, written and directed by Woody Allen, Sony Picture Classics, 2011


Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda (no last name needed for Jazz Age aficionados, right?), Cole Porter, T.S. Eliot, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, hell even Djuana Barnes are names from the Jazz Age and the American post- World War I expatriate night that get bandied about in Woody Allen’s 2011 comedic effort, Midnight In Paris. There were plenty of other names dropped as well but the above popped out in memory’s eye and serve my point. This film is a paean to that by-gone age just far enough back for Woody (and me) to not have been splashed by the Jazz Age karma but wishing, wishing like crazy, we could have lived at that time –in that city, Paris and been washed by the spectacular antics and struggles that went on there to create a modern literary and cultural world. And in the end that is Woody’s point, as he has one of his throw-back jazz Age characters pine for an even earlier time- the last quarter of the 19th century-La Belle Epogue. Nice spin, Woody.

But to the plot that brings this whole thing together in magic realistic way and without being too ham-handed on the “moral”. Woody (oops) Gil (played with some Woody-like physical and expressive mannerism by Owen Wilson) is a thoroughly modern frustrated Hollywood screenwriter who yearns to write the great American novel, or at least something other than the drivel that passes for language in most of his screenwriting. He and his fiancée, Inez (played by Rachael McAdams), are in Paris on a lark before getting married. Gil loves Paris, his version of Paris, the Paris of the American ex –pat 1920s Jazz Age when the great creative spirits of the early 20th century held forth and lit up the cultural post-war wasteland night. Inez is a little, no, a lot more bourgeois, and just wants Gil to keep making the kale so they can afford that high-end La-La land lifestyle. This will not be a match made in heaven, no question.

Gil though through cinematic magical realism finds his way back to the Paris of the 1920s around midnight each night and from there is able to find his true self, or what he thinks is his true self. Naturally a women (Pablo Picasso’s, mistress, or one of them) is there to goad him along but also to pose the question about what craving for earlier unattainable times mean. In the end Gil is “liberated” from Inez (she was two-timing him anyway with some pedantic prof) and can walk the rainy 2010s streets of Paris and really make his literary breakthrough. This is one of Woody’s better recent efforts. Proof. A person whom I respect very much as a cinematic aficionado said this is the first Woody Allen film that she could sit through to the end and wish that it didn’t end. High praise indeed.

Out Of The Swing And Sway 1920s Jazz Night- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Basil And Josephine Stories”

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Book Review

The Basil and Josephine Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner’s, New York, 1973The name F. Scott Fitzgerald is no stranger to this space as the master writer of one of the great American novels of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby. And as one of the key players (many of them spending time in self-imposed European exile) in American literature in the so-called Jazz Age in the aftermath of World War I. For this writer he formed, along with Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and a little, Dorothy Parker and Gertrude Stein the foundation for modern American writing. But that recognition was a later development, far later, because I knew of Fitzgerald’s work long before I had read any of his (or the others, for that matter) better known works. I knew the Basil and Josephine stories well before that.

As a kid in the 1950s the library that I spent many an hour in was divided, as they are in most libraries even today, into children’s and adult’s sections. At that time there was something of a Chinese Wall between the two sections in the form of a stern old librarian who made sure that kids, sneaky kids like me didn’t go into that forbidden adult section until the proper time (after sixth grade as I recall). The Basil and Josephine stories were, fortunately, in the kid’s section (although I have seen them in adult sections of libraries as well). And while the literary merits of the stories are adult worthy of mention for the clarity of Fitzgerald’s language, the thoughtful plots (mainly, although a couple are kind of similar reflecting the mass magazine adult audience they were addressed to), and the evocative style (of that “age of innocence” just before World War I after which the world changed dramatically. No more innocent when you dream notions, not after the mustard gas and the trench warfare) for me on that long ago first reading what intrigued me was the idea of how the other half-the rich (well less than half, much less as it turns out) lived.

This was fascinating for a poor boy, a poor "projects" boy like me, who was clueless about half the stuff Basil got to do (riding trains, going to boarding school, checking out colleges, playing some football, and seriously, very seriously checking out the girls at exotic-sounding dances, definitely not our 1950s school sock hops). And I was clueless, almost totally clueless, about what haughty, serenely beautiful, guy-crazy Josephine was up to. So this little set of short stories was something like my introduction to class, the upper class, in literature.

Of course when I talk about the 1950s in the old projects, especially the later part when I used to hang around with one Billie, William James Bradley, self-proclaimed king of the be-bop night at our old elementary school (well, not exactly self-proclaimed, I helped the legend along a little) I have to give Billie's take on the matter. His first reaction was why I was reading this stuff, this stuff that was not required school reading stuff anyway. Then when I kept going on and on about the stories, and trying to get him to read them, he exploded one day and shouted out “how is reading those stories going to get you or me out of these damn projects?”

Good point now that I think about it but I would not let it go at that. I started in on a little tidbit about how one of the stories was rejected by the magazine publishers because they thought the subject of ten or eleven year olds being into “petting parties” was crazy. That got Billie attention as he wailed about how those guys obviously had never been to the projects where everyone learned (or half-learned) about sex sometimes even earlier than that, innocent as it might have been. He said he might actually read the stuff now that he saw that rich kids, anyway, were up against the same stuff we were. He never did. But the themes of teen alienation, teen angst, teen vanity, teen love are all there. And while the rich are different from you and I, and life, including young life, plays out differently for them those themes seem embedded in youth culture ever since teenage because a separate social category. Read on.