Late me naysay at least a little on "Midnight In Paris", Woody Allen's fantasy in which he returns (in the guise of Owen Wilson) to the 1920s through some hocus pocus and hangs with Scott and Zelda, Ernest, Luis Bunuel, Picasso and Gertrude Stein to learn a lesson in nostalgia's limitations.
For our purposes, it is a pity all we get to see of a Cole Porter is him sitting at a piano playing "Let's Fall In Love". And he is still more thoroughly realized drawn then the rest of the luminous stars of a bygone age. The Ernest Hemingway, asking a woman if she has having looked a wild tiger in the ear, is particularly preposterous. Simply insulting, and reminiscent of "Back To The Future" where Michael J. Fox gives Chuck Berry the idea for "Johnny B. Goode". Allen has Gil (ergo Wilson ergo Allen) give Luis Bunuel the idea for "The Discrete Charm Of The Bourgeois".
Gil is a successful Hollywood screenwriter, engaged to a bitch on wheels, who is back in Paris with his fiance and rich in-laws. On a tipsy walk at Midnight, a call offers him a ride and he is back in the 1920s. Everybody acts exactly as you would imagine they would: it's like if you went back to 1965 and Lennon acted as though he just stepped out of "Help" than as he really was.
Anyway, blah blah blah, there's no place like Paris in the 21st Century. next.
I am a huge Woody Allen fan and I have no problems with the movie at all. But I don't have much for it either. For a fantasy to resonate it needs to be your fantasy.
Incidentally, along with Gershwin, Irving Berlin and just about nobody else, Cole Porter was the greatest songwriter of his generation and if I dropped in at a party where Cole Porter was entertaining, I would have spoken to him. At length if he would have let me.