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| Recognize this? You should, because the movie starts with hours of this stuff. (Photo from wlappe on Flickr) |
I actually quite enjoyed this film. It has to be one of Woody Allen's most accessible stories and I liked the escapist narrative. It's a lot easier to identify with the characters compared to, say Vicky Christina Barcelona, where I hated pretty much everyone in the movie. My biggest complaint, which on the whole is really a very small complaint, is that I felt pretty dumb every time I missed an obvious literary or cultural reference. And they are all obvious. You know when you are missing the joke.
A central theme is that everyone romanticizes some past time period as the golden age. So no matter how much you idealize a particular point in the past, people who lived then thought some even more previous time was better. I find this intriguing because I really don't idealize any of the past. As a society, I don't have any romantic notions of those days when cholera was a big deal, or when we didn't have the internet, or routine bathing.
On a personal level I don't think back fondly at any of my past as being better than what I have now. I suppose you could chalk that up to having an amazingly fortunate life, one that keeps getting better all the time, but so many people I know really do think of their childhood or high school or university as the best times of their lives. I look back on who I was and what I was doing for pretty much every phase of my life up to being married and having kids with total body-shaking cringes. So self-absorbed! So awkward! So unsocialized!
It's know that just because you idealize a previous part of your life doesn't mean you want to go back to that time. But in my case, I'd "rather just forget" all of it. Wipe the slate clean and pretend it never happened. So for me, the here and now is the golden age.
ps I had totally forgotten Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams had been in Wedding Crashers together.
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