Paris, je t’aime

I adored Woody Allen’s latest, Midnight in Paris. Here’s my review, which can also be found on the LGBT Weekly website.

Midnight in Paris
Written and directed by Woody Allen
Starring Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, and Rachel McAdams
Rated PG-13
Opens May 27
At Landmark Hillcrest and La Jolla

For the first 25 years of his career, Woody Allen couldn’t make a bad movie. In fact, he made several inarguable masterpieces like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Then about 15 years ago – shortly after he left Mia Farrow for Farrow’s adopted daughter and was then accused of molesting his own daughter – Allen’s work became inconsistent. He made some great movies, like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and some pretty lame ones, like Celebrity, Scoop, and Melinda and Melinda.

I am happy to say that his latest film, Midnight in Paris, is one of the good ones, a delightful, fantastical comedy about what happens when one of your greatest dreams comes true.

As in most of Allen’s comedies, if Allen isn’t the star, the lead actor is usually a stand-in for Allen. In Midnight in Paris, this time that stand-in is Gil, played to wide-eyed, neurotic, self-flagellating perfection by Owen Wilson. He is a successful screenwriter of terrible Hollywood hits, but he really wants to be a serious novelist, and the book he’s working on takes place in a nostalgia shop.

One night, after drinking with and being irritated by his family and friends, Gil decides to go for a midnight stroll through the city. After he gets lost, an old car rolls up and the Parisians inside beckon him with liquor and laughter. Gil gets in the car and ends up in the 1920s, when and where he encounters and befriends his literary and artistic idols, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali and Gertrude Stein, who agrees to critique Gil’s novel.

And he meets Adriana, Pablo Picasso’s girlfriend, who Gil quickly becomes infatuated with, a task not terribly surprising since she is played by slinky, stunning Marion Cotillard. Once Gil discovers that he can go back to the wondrous 1920s every night, his unsatisfying 2011 life becomes rather complicated, and those complexities make for classic comedic fodder.

Except when he was infatuated with a mediocre blonde actress like Mia Farrow or Scarlett Johansson, Allen has always cast his films perfectly, and every actor in Midnight in Paris makes the most of Allen’s trademark quick, pungent lines.

Wilson is perhaps the most fun to watch. He’s a limited actor; he never does anything much different from Wilson himself. But he’s never had the sort of material to work with that he does here, and as the film’s endearing, wry and amazed tour guide to post-war Paris, he does the best work of his career.

Every other role is comparatively small, but Rachel McAdams and Cotillard make the most of being Allen’s archetypes, respectively, of a harpy and an angel. Michael Sheen gets a laugh from his pretentious, “pedantic” character’s every ostentatious display of intelligence, and as Hemingway, Corey Stoll provides a parody of the great writer’s clipped diction and distinct bravado that is pitch perfect and more than a little sexy.

| Biblical Marion Cotillard Owen Wilson Paris Rachel McAdams Woody Allen

[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 17: A Song I Hear Often On The Radio

In the continuing theme of the ridiculous and sublime, I am choosing two songs for this category. I live in Southern California, so I by culture and necessity, I drive a lot. I prefer listening to the radio when I drive over listening to my iPod, so I hear a lot of stuff on basically two formats, Modern Rock and Pop. The pop station I listen to is one of the cookie cutter Clear Channel stations that plays the same songs over and over again, with the top 10 Billboard songs getting even more play, which means if a song is #1, it’s on all of the time. So, this past month, it’s been all about Katy Perry’s “ET” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” which have both been #1. And since I also listen to two supposedly alternative rock stations, too, I hear Adele’s song even more. “ET” is absurd; it’s about hot sex, alien-style. It’s catchy and very, very stupid. “Rolling in the Deep” is brilliant — a moving, danceable, perfectly produced and hauntingly sung. But I turn it off whenever I hear the first few notes because I don’t want it to go the way of “Fuck You.”

Music

| Adele Biblical Clear Channel Katy Perry

[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 16: A Song I Used To Love But Now Hate

Ack. Now I’m a whole day off!

Anyway.

I gave a Golden Teddy Award to Cee Lo’s “Fuck You” because it was a gleeful,, snappy, crazily catchy old school — as in 60s old school — pop song. But then everyone else agreed. But the ridiculousness of the FCC prevents the word “fuck” from airing on the radio, and Cee Lo saw $$$!, so he re-recorded the song as “Forget You.” The song lost all of its bite and became ubiquitous. I found it so annoying that I began to loathe even the original version. I’ll turn off whatever sound blasting device if I hear the opening notes.

Here are the videos for the two versions.

Music

| Biblical Cee Lo Green censorship fuck Golden Teddy Awards

You’d need to be still drunk to like The Hangover Part 2

This review is not going to appear in LGBT Weekly until next week, but I was so angry at the movie, I wanted to get it out there now. Also, I wanted to get out the uncut version, since it’s probably too long for the paper. Here it is:

The Hangover, Part 2
Directed by Todd Phillips
Written by Craig Mazin & Scot Armstrong & Todd Phillips
Starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis
Very, very rated R
At your local multiplex

A few weeks ago, I wrote a summer movie preview in these pages that expressed excitement about The Hangover Part 2 because The Hangover put its characters into some “pretty homosexually awkward situations” and Part 2 would probably only up the ante. And it did. Oh, boy, did it. My prescience should not be rewarded, because by upping the ante, Part 2 bypassed “more titillating” and landed squarely at “shocking and offensive.” While the casual racism, homophobia, and misogyny of the three leads in Part 1 were nearly irrelevant to a story that revolved around violent slapstick and silly sight gags, in Part 2, both the jokes and the plot are structured by a 21st century version of yellow peril, from vapid Asian stereotypes to the fear of Thai transsexuals.

The plot of Part 2 is basically the same as Part 1: Phil the ass (Bradley Cooper), Stu the nerd (Ed Helms), and Alan the nut (Zach Galifianakis) wake up from a night of pre-wedding debauchery, remember nothing, and cannot find the fourth person in their party. Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), an oddly effeminate crime lord with a thick Chinese accent and a penchant for hip-hop slang, is again at the center of the problem, and he’s again buck naked and crazy.

The main differences in Part 2 are that Las Vegas has been swapped for Bangkok, the baby Alan carried in Part 1 has been replaced with a smoking and drug-dealing monkey, and the person missing is not the groom but Teddy (Mason Lee), the brother of the bride. This time, Stu is the groom, and his bride-to-be is a beautiful Thai woman whose father thinks that Stu is the human equivalent of mushy rice. When Teddy is lost, Stu is convinced that he will lose his bride. (I’m not naming her or the actress, because like all of other women in The Hangover Part 2 and director Todd Phillips’s movies, she’s only relevant as a plot device.)

The bulk of the film focuses on Phil, Stu, and Alan’s quest to find Teddy, which takes them to a Buddhist monastery, a tattoo parlor, breakfast with Paul Giamatti, and on a physically improbable car chase. When the movie is using Jeong’s high-pitched one-liners, Galifianakis’s dead-pan non-sequiturs, and Helms’s almost acrobatic freak-outs as the sources for laughter, Part 2 earns its laughs. But too often the actors are reacting to the writers’ violent and mean-spirited plotting that is all explained by blaming Bangkok, as if the ancient, bustling Thai city and not the childish behavior of three jerks from the US caused the riot, amputation, and mistaken identity that are central to the story. I found myself laughing less at the movie’s humor than at my own nervous outrage.

SPOILER ALERT! For example, the trio ends up at a night club where, the night before, Stu had met and had sex with one of the dancers. When it is revealed that the dancer is a pre-op transsexual and had topped Stu, the dancer’s penis becomes Part 2’s equivalent of There’s Something About Mary’s hair gel. This is the centerpiece joke of the film, the one meant to be talked about the next day and the week to come. And it is based on the fear of gay sex, of transsexuals, of the mysterious, shifty Asian culture.

But wait, it gets worse. The second to last image in the film is Phil and Mr. Chow recreating, as a joke, the iconic, horrific Eddie Adams photo of a South Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong prisoner with a shot to the head. To say this is offensive is an understatement; it’s simply despicable.

| Biblical Thailand transphobia Vietnam Yellow Peril

[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 15: A Song That Describes Me

I didn’t know what to do with this one, so I crowd-sourced it. The suggestions made on Facebook were all pretty amazing — as either ridiculous or sublime — and I kept waiting for more, which is why I didn’t end up posting last night. So, my apologies for the three people who have been following the Challenge regularly. Some of the songs that were suggested were actually so good that I feel embarrassed to associate them with me or my, uh, subjectivity. And some were just hilariously wrong, like the two suggested by my husband. So, here’s what my friends came up with:

Chris H. suggested the Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring.” I don’t if I can live up to this one.

Brock S. suggested Badly Drawn Boys’ “Silent Sigh.” Wow.

Adia B. simply wrote “young gifted and black.” I know I can’t live up to this one.

Rob suggested “There’s No Business Like [the] Show Business” and “Mad World.” WTF? I am not a crazy show queen! The “[the]” is in reference to my weird habit of including an extra “the” in the song when I sing it. (Oh, wait. Crazy. Show queen. Hmm.) I don’t remember why I started doing that. There’s some inside joke that is now so inside it’s become a black hole. Anyway, I chose the disco version of the first song, which is the definition of awesomesauce, and the Gary Jules version of the second. Adam Lambert’s version is better but not embeddable.

Jason F. wrote “‘Gideon’ by My Morning Jacket, or ‘Camel Toe’ by Fannypack.” Sublime and ridiculous, respectively.

Tom W.: “the song that comes to mind is ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ by Taco.” I don’t even know what to say. Anyway, I’m embedding the uncensored version. Guess what was deleted from the video when it ran on MTV.