Paris After Midnight

I realize that many of you visit this site for the film reviews.  O.K.  Quit clamoring.  Even with considerable talent, it is difficult to be all things to all people.  Even with such a "refined" audience as this one.

Last night I went for sushi and a movie.  Big night out.  When I walked into the sushi restaurant, the hostess tried to seat me outside on the veranda where I normally sit, but a big truck was making a delivery and I didn't want to sit beside the noise.  I hate noise more than most.  So I sat at the bar while the troops flocked around wanting to know where I had been.

"We not see you long time.  Where you been."

"I quit coming so much after you put the speakers on the veranda.  Why would you play a radio station? Who does that attract?  Ask anyone if they come to hear that.  I can't imagine anyone saying yes.  But you have lost hundreds of dollars of my business.  It is awful."

Saying that made me feel good and bad.  I never really calculate how much money people are taking from me.

They huddled together away from me talking excitedly.  It was all muddled except the word "radio."  From the time I had come in until my Kirin arrived, several servers asked me if I was having "the usual."  Yes, I thought, they do take a lot of my money.

When the Kirin arrived, I remembered once again to quit ordering it.  It is surely made with radioactive water by now.  I tell the waiter, "Perhaps I'll gain superpowers."  He laughs and says he will drink some after work to see.

"You'll turn into Godzilla instead," I tell him, thinking after I say it how wrong that sounds.  For a few moments, I wonder if perhaps it is a genetic problem.

Oh. . . movie review.

After sushi, I bought my ticket for Woody Allen's "Paris After Midnight."  It has gotten wonderful reviews from almost every sort of reviewer as if they all agreed to give Allen a pass on this one, even the one's who refer to him as "an old perv."  It was one of the darlings at Cannes, and for the first time in years, regular theaters are giving an Allen film a run of more than a week--with advertising!  


 What did I expect?  The crowd was older, but I only paid attention to the two young couples who were there.  Why? I wondered.  Must be film majors, I thought.  Of course, I was at the film equivalent of the "blue plate special," having gone to the seven o'clock show.  I hadn't wanted to go alone to the theater with "normal" people.  "Shit," I thought, I should have brought a flask."

The movie didn't suck.  It had elements.  Allen does for Paris what he does for New York.  I love and believe in his image of each.  And the performances by the actors who portray Hemingway and Scott and Zelda and Dali are spectacular.  But this is the sort of Allen movie I like least but which plays best with popular audiences.  There is a goofiness to it that. . . well.  It is not like "Manhattan."

O.K.  That is not a movie review.  The movie is pretty, whimsical, and charming.  But it is not interesting.  I am media y media on it.

Who cares.

I made some toast somewhere in the middle of writing this.  The cat got under my feet when I began pulling things out of the refrigerator, and we got into an argument.  And I realized just then that I have begun talking to the cat.  Now this, in my judgement, is a very bad sign.  I am talking to her waaayy too much.  Definitely a danger signal.  Dinner and a movie alone, talking to the cat. . . what next?