Historical and literary homicide...

I know that sounds dramatic.

But it's the crime Woody Allen is suddenly very guilty of, via his new film "Midnight in Paris."  Despite having the most contrived-sounding title ever, I became convinced the movie must be good...since reviewers and critics were raving about its run at Cannes, and because I had so many friends who were excited about it as well.  We'd been conned.

I won't give away too much of a spoiler, just in case you still want to throw ten dollars down a metaphorical toilet and go see this.  But the basic premise of the story is that Owen Wilson's character Gil--an under-confident Hollywood writer who aspires to write the next great novel but knows full-well he probably doesn't have the chops to do so--starts traveling, nightly, back in time to the Paris of the 1920s (while Rachel McAdams, his fiancee, sneaks off to carouse with pretentious assholes in present-day).  Stupid to begin with.  Like some comedic take on "Inception."  But what's worse is that Allen has hired actors to PLAY Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Picasso, Gertrude Stein...all of the artists and writers that lived in Paris in the twenties and created the works we still breathe heavy about today.  The actress who plays Zelda Fitzgerald pops on screen...and, not thirty minutes into the film, it's all dead in the water.  Who can play Zelda?  The bad mop of frizzy hair on this actress' head, combined with her annoying accent...geez, Allen, get a better casting agent if nothing else.  The guy who played Hemingway was so robotic and scripted that at first I thought the whole time-travel thing was a dream-sequence joke.

No such luck.  All these larger-than-life figures are played with very little gusto by actors who have probably never read or seen any of the work.  That might be a mean comment.

I don't care.  I'm an Allen fan more generally, but this was over-rated shit.  McAdams isn't even nice here, and...who makes her unlikeable?  My friend Catherine commented that a fifteen-year-old could have written this script.  Save for one hilarious line about one of Picasso's mistresses, I had to agree.

Hollywood should come knocking on my door.

In the meantime, I may commit a historical homicide tomorrow if I don't work out this lecture on the Old South properly.