What's Your Favorite Movie?

As an adult, I don't have a lot of favorites. My kids were always trying to pin me down to my favorite color, my favorite food, my favorite child.
But I do have two favorite movies. One of them is recent and the other has been my favorite since grad school.
We've rented Midnight in Paris several times. When the Redbox dvd froze the other night, Earl pointed out that we simply should have bought the movie. I love all the scenes of Paris. We play the "I've been there" game with Grace along, and I got to play it with my friend Ruth the other night too. She hadn't seen the movie. Doesn't like Woody Allen. Doesn't like Owen Wilson.
"Yeah, but that doesn't matter. You'll like this movie," I told her and I was right.
I also love figuring out who all the historical characters are. Of course, I recognized the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein right away. Man Ray? Luis Bunuel? I didn't know about those surrealists or American writer Djuna Barnes.
I see something different every time I watch it.
And, of course, Wilson's fiance in the movie is so dismissive of his love for Paris and urge to finish his novel. I spend the movie trying to convince the screen that he should dump the fiance.

My long-term favorite movie is Room With a View. I find myself quoting this movie or thinking of scenes in this movie all the time. Just this morning I said, "I can't go running at you now, can I?" quoting the Helena Bonham Carter character as she encourages her fiance, Daniel Day Lewis to give her a first passionate kiss.  I think of our French friend Maguerite as the proper maiden aunt Charlotte Bartlett and wrote in my memoir how the family dreaded her visit at the vacation house in Corsica, just as they dreaded having "Poor Charlotte." The movie is so witty and clever, plus it has the first full-frontal male nudity I ever saw in a movie when the men are skinny-dipping in a pool and Helena Bonham Carter, her mother and fiance are walking past. Another hilarious scene. And I frequently find myself wanting to call out "Truth, Beauty..." the motto of the young George Sands character, who yells this from a tree, before the branch breaks and he takes a tumble to the Tuscan countryside. Tourists are mocked. Romances are mocked. The idea of raising children in the countryside to maintain their innocence before sending them on a world tour to finish them, seems like what we might have done with Grace. See how I've embraced this movie.

How about you? Do you have a favorite movie? Why is it your favorite?

Midnight in Paris Review

Manifique! Superbe! Charmante!
Imagine a movie filled with images of something you love and long for. I saw another reviewer explain that Paris is the main character in this movie, and I have to agree. The movie begins with shots of famous Paris monuments and tourist attractions.
At first, Earl elbowed me each time he recognized something in Paris -- Monet's gardens, the green metal book stalls along the Seine -- until I threatened him. After all, we had visited most of those tourist attractions.
I'm not a Woody Allen fan, but I loved this movie. From the previews,I could see that Owen Wilson, who plays Gil the main actor, yearned for Paris. He plays a writer, so already here is another connection. A writer who loves Paris -- I felt I could relate.
What I didn't get from the previews was that Gil goes back in time to the Roaring 20s, the time when Paris teamed with American writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Stein; painters like Picasso and Dali; along with surrealist filmmakers.
The frenetic Gil itches to be in the Paris of the 20s until he is transported and finally learns that people, maybe writers and artists and philosophers, long for that time in the past when things were better. Yet each time period wishes to have experienced a previous, better time period.
It made me think of an episode of Mad Men where Don pitched the Kodak slide carousel. He explained, "...in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone."
Perhaps people are always nostalgic for that time they can't recapture. They remember it as a superior time.
I wonder if Woody Allen is nostalgic for a simpler time, or maybe, like me, he simply loves Paris and wanted to showcase it in a movie.
I'm so glad that he did.