The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/woody-allen/)
Phoebe Bridgers and Annie Hall (with their little meta-textual trivia bits) occupy a bizarre place in my mind: vestiges of that last relationship not fully unlocked for me until it was over.
2011 saw the release of Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris. Viewers follow an American screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson) as he wanders around Paris drunk one evening, gets transported to the 1920’s and grows infatuated with the famous figures he interacts with. His affair with another time period interferes with the time he tries to spend with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams). One does fantasize about the lives that contributed to a golden age of art, music and literature. In fact, I’ve been testing out this theory of using wine as a vehicle to time travel for a while.
In the most recent season of Louis C.K.’s hilariously depressing series Louie, the titular character takes his 16-year-old daughter to a matinee of a “celebrated 1960s play” that stars the dream lineup of Michael Cera, John Lithgow and Matthew Broderick (sadly, this play does not exist and was created for the purpose of the show). During an especially dramatic moment in the performance, Louie looks over at his daughter, Lilly, and notices her messing with her phone. Immediately after the curtain falls, he commences a familiar tirade about her (our) entire generation sacrificing their engagement with the real world in favor of a screen-based lifestyle. In a moment uncharacteristic of the show, Lilly snaps back, explaining that she had been reading up on the play’s production history in order to better understand what was happening onstage. Louie’s reaction is priceless — equal parts pleased by his daughter’s appreciation of the play and shocked by his own false assumptions about her.