Owen Wilson meets Ernest Hemingway - some of Woody Allen's best dialog ever

Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" is a throwback and a return to the form and sensibility of some of his best movies. We get the familiar enamored look at a beautiful city, the tortured relation between a young guy and the beautiful girl with whom he's obviously mismatched, and most of all the playful fascination and complete devotion to art, music, ideas, and literature, and withering (though funny) contempt for pseudo-intellectuals (as in the great McLuhan scene in Annie Hall or the literary-magazine party where W.A. sneaks off to watch a Knicks game on TV in - which film was it?) Allen always casts his movies well, and the choice of surfer-slacker Owen Wilson to play the would-be novelist, a character that Allen himself would have played a generation ago and that is so deeply imprinted with Allen's tone and voice and wit, is shrewd and surprising and effective. Wilson leaves his beautiful and shallow and vain fiancee behind to walk the streets of Paris at night, where he is transported into the 1920s and meets a # of his heroes, including FS Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates is hilarious) Luis Bunuel (Wilson suggests a movie plot to him - Exterminating Angel - and Bunuel is just puzzled: How come they can never leave the room? Why don't they just get up and leave?), and most amusingly Hemingway (some of Allen's funniest dialog ever). The film recalls the time-transports of Play It Again, Sam and, even more so, the great short story The Kugelmass Episode. Autobiographical elements aside (hero leaves rich and cold fiancee for a very young woman who at last seems to understand him and his romantic obsessions; I hate to think that Allen thinks of himself as a Hollywood hack with dreams of literary greatness, however), the timing and plotting is clever and well-paced and it's a totally fun movie to watch - a bauble at times, but also a tribute to the great writing and ideas and well-made plots and rich cultural life of a time long past.