Movies in English at Chamonix Cinema (31st August - 10th September 2011)

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Michael Winterbottom's The Trip are playing in original language English (V/O) with French subtitles at Chamonix's Cinema Vox from 31st August to 10th September.

Cinema Vox will be closed from 10th to 28th September before reopening for the autumn interseason - watch this space for forthcoming movies!

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

Director Woody Allen's latest film, which premiered in Cannes this year, is a romantic comedy about a family travelling to Paris for business, including a young engaged couple. Our hero, one half of the couple, is unhappy, but not entirely sure how to amend his malcontent. During his rambling evening walks, our hero finds that he is transported to 1920's Paris every night at midnight when he stands at a certain place in the city. In this other age he meets many of his heroes, such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Bunuel, Picasso, Man Ray and Gertrude Stein. During these visits, our hero is forced to confront his illusion that a life different from his own is better, even as he also finds that some elements of his dreams are worth pursuing in his ‘real' life.

This film is not one of Allen's greats - Manhattan or Annie Hall or even The Mighty Aphrodite - but it is the best of recent years and absolutely worth watching. That said, it's not a film for everyone because of its literary and artistic references as well as its subtext of existentialism, but that's not to say that it's ‘high brow' or overly intellectual at all.

Ultimately, Woody Allen's film is an homage to creativity and dreams as a reality rather than as an illusion. This reviewer left the cinema after watching this film feeling that "all things are possible."

THE TRIP

Steve Coogan has been asked by The Observer of London to review six of the finest restaurants in Northern England. He plans to take his pretend girlfriend Mischa, but after she backs out he is forced, with demonstratable reluctance, to take his best friend and source of eternal aggravation, Rob Brydon.

The Trip was a six-part BBC2 series last fall and almost everything - the title, premise, the duelling funnymen (also from Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, an earlier film of Michael Winterbottom's) are the same except for the abbreviated length for the movie and some gags consequently lost in the process of shortening. In between the food, the vocal caricatures and Lake District landscapes, the duo goad each other with smiling insults and prickly jokes, all the while comparing their successes. Sometimes the camaraderie edges into aggression but this is soon stifled by laughter and good humour; lots of tears and laughs.