While the last post on here was entirely positive and flattering of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, I have to address what some regard as that film’s major shortcoming, which is that it is for a very specific audience. By catering the entire thing for English majors – and taking a few cheap shots at Tea Party politics – it’s no surprise that some of the reviews have been less than flattering (including several descriptions of it being “Night at the Museum for the liberal arts crowd.”)
Naturally, it is inevitable that the Tea Party will have their rebuttal. They always do – whether it’s responding to Obama entertaining Common, Jon Stewart making a joke at their expense, or Jon Stewart making another joke at their expense – there is always a response.
Which brings me to what their rebuttal should inevitably be: Midnight in Boston, a tale of a young engaged couple on their first visit to Boston, excited to see all their favorite sites from American History. Our vacationers have never been to the East Coast before. They come from somewhere far away where ordinary folk live, like Minnesota or Alaska. Our female protagonist is a headstrong, say-it-like-it-is aspiring politician, who is gradually realizing that perhaps she is not happy with her liberal, boring, college professor husband… and that maybe she wants to move out here to Boston, the place where the American Dream was born!
She suddenly finds herself whisked back in time to 1776, when she goes on a midnight walk and up rides none other than Paul Revere. He’s a burly, gun-brandishing, sword-carrying true Rebel, and he invites her to jump on the back of her horse while he rides across Boston, warning the British that he and his friends have guns, and that the British can’t take their guns away, so they better go home!
On the next night, she goes back to a different day in 1776, where she witnesses the Boston Massacre, seeing the British troops unload their cannons and muskets into an unarmed crowd of women and children. In the aftermath of the Massacre, she gathers with a crowd of true heroes like Benjamin Franklin (inventor of lightbulbs, bifocals, and telephones), Thomas Jefferson (Hater of all things French), Thomas Paine (a tearful, passionate Christian and hater of socialism) and even the eloquent John Quincy Adams – the Founding Son of America, an eight year old with a silver tongue who makes a passioned speech for the abolition of slavery, moving everyone to tears and causing them to add the Three Fifths rule into the Declaration of Independence.
Together, our hero teams up with the Founding Fathers as they dress in war paint and dump the tea of the evil Brits into Boston Harbor. She fights to refudiate the evil British, along with their allies, the French and the South Koreans. She finally helps them pen the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July, 1776, ensuring that our founding documents declare our America to be a Christian nation, where “Under God” is in the Pledge of Allegiance, the media cannot attack you because the First Amendment guarantees that you can say whatever you want and no one is allowed to criticize you, and where all men are created equal (as long as they were born here, aren’t homosexual, and have never met a Muslim.)
The final scene concludes with our heroine realizing that she cannot stay in the past – she must move forward and bring the past to the future, where she can choose which parts she liked and harp on those repeatedly, while rewriting the parts she can’t properly remember, and completely omitting the parts she disagrees with.
Let’s hope that Bale would be far too good for this film, but he could play a rather tyrannical King George (who is also a homosexual abortionist socialist from Kenya.)
This is so good.