Midnight In Paris

Got to see Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris, on a plane from Dubai to SF. Last time on an Emirates flight, it was Abida Parveen's main hosh mein hoon to ghazal, and this time it was Woody Allen's latest classic.
(Just before that I saw Mel Brookes' Smoking Saddles. But it was only very funny).

Well, with the kid and all, watching movies in theaters is a thing of the past. Thank God there's Emirates.

It's a very original script: a budding writer transported to the 20's Paris he so would have liked to live in. Surrounded by artists and writers he admires. Hemingway, Picasso, Matisse, Fitzgerald, Elliot, Dali. It was the kind of feeling I got when I saw familiar poets, Ghalib, Zafar, Zauq, Momin in Mirza Ghalib serial by Gulzar. But of course, Woody Allen has given this original twist of a non-scientific time travel, where at Midnight the movie's protagonist is suddenly transported to the 20s Paris society.

The central thought of the movie is that most of us think of an earlier time, not today, as an artistic golden age, and it is possible that people who we think lived in a golden age, ignored the great art happening around them and instead looked back with fondness on an even earlier time. Hmm. Does this happen a lot? Not in all cases I think - maybe 50-50, or normal probability. For. eg. Woody Allen himself is quite a celebrated filmmaker in his own time.

It was great to see how Picasso and Hemingway looked - I am assuming Woody Allen would have managed to create the respective authentic looks. It was also interesting to hear Hemingway saying that all writers are competitiors and he would hate any author's work - if it was bad, then because it was bad, and if good, out of envy. There have been times when I have liked something so much that I have not been able to read it further out of envy. Even on this trip, I was thinking of taking along Khushwant Singh's Delhi but felt that I could not re-read so well written a book.

Woody Allen is for me the best movie maker today. Midnight in Paris is so gripping, I could not stop watching even though it was the second movie on the trot, and I was feeling sleepy. Could not also resist writing about it immediately.