Café Society

Cafe_SocietyPosterKristen Stewart is only 26, but she feels as though she could’ve been in Woody Allen’s movies since the ‘70s. The camera loves her face, her hair, and the way she dresses. Stewart was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet following “Twilight,” and in “Café Society,” a movie that’s all about how culture and class changes and effects people, Allen sees her as authentic.

Stewart plays Vonnie (short for Veronica), the center of a love triangle between her fun and care free boyfriend Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg) and her wealthy and married lover Phil (Steve Carell) nearly twice her age. Set in the 1940s in the heyday of Old Hollywood, Bobby has just moved to Los Angeles to get away from New York and try and make it by doing work at his uncle Phil’s agency. Of course, this is a Woody Allen movie, and Bobby can’t resist saying how much different and better New York is than LA at every turn. In fact Allen probably couldn’t have tolerated LA in any other period than the ‘40s, using it as an excuse to talk about jazz, so here we are. Continue reading “Café Society”

Midnight in Paris

If Woody Allen were 40 years younger, I can sense him itching to get in front of the camera again for his latest film “Midnight in Paris.”

This time around, he seems to address his critics’ pleas over the last 20 years for him to simply return to the golden age of film making he had in the ‘70s and ‘80s and responds by quelling his own neuroses of nostalgia by optimistically looking towards the future.

He does so in a film dripping with love for his own nostalgic influences and styles. “Midnight in Paris” is classic Allen from the first title card. The opening shots recall “Manhattan” in every detail but the black and white. It stars Owen Wilson as a spot-on Woody Allen surrogate and Michael Sheen (sporting a convincing American accent) in the Alan Alda or Max von Sydow pompous intellectual role common throughout all of his classics. Continue reading “Midnight in Paris”