ViewGuide

Created Sep 23, 2011 08:17PM PST • Edited Apr 30, 2024 05:14PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Barely OK 2.0

   How did this kitsch-fest become Woody Allen’s highest grossing movie? Paris is beautiful, oui. The lives of great artists are fascinating, oui, oui. But a cheap time-travel gimmick in service to a shopworn Woody Allen plot squanders such gifts.

   The answer to its popularity must be the voyeuristic fun of spying on great artists like Hemingway and Picasso, sort of a People magazine for art history romantics, a grown-up Night at the Museum. Fair enough, just don’t call it art. For me, it nearly sank below the level of entertainment.

   Vicky Cristina Barcelona it ain’t.

4. Acting

   Barely OK 2.0

   Owen Wilson makes a weak Woody Allen doppelgänger. Likable actor, poor role.

   Rachel McAdams plays an unlikable character unlikably. But then this wouldn’t be the first time a smart and beautiful actress made a poor choice about appearing in a Woody Allen movie.

   Two French actresses are the best performers on screen.

   • Marion Cotillard charms greatly as a lovely artistic muse.
   • First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, charms in a petite role as a museum guide.

   Sadly the performers playing the great artists who once made Paris their home deliver impressions, not full blooded performances. Phonies, nearly one and all.

5. Male Stars OK 2.5

6. Female Stars Barely OK 2.0

7. Female Costars OK 2.5

8. Male Costars Pretty Bad 1.5

10. Film

    OK 2.5

    Woody Allen films are always kvetchy. They’re rarely this banal, uncharismatic and tedious.

11. Direction OK 2.5

12. Play Barely OK 2.0

    Woody is too good a writer to not have something up his sleeve. So he does pull out a decent twist towards the end that rescues the film from awfulness.

13. Music Good 3.0

14. Visuals Good 3.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.2

17. Sex Innocent 1.2

18. Violence Gentle 1.0

19. Rudeness Polite 1.3

21. Reality

    Glib 1.8

    Real or surreal? Appropriate question for a movie featuring Salvador Dali. Taking the movie at face value, not granting it the Wizard of Oz exemption, the answer is surreal physioreality.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.4

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Surreal 3.0