Pretentious, moi?

Rating: 4/10 (12 November 2011)

After an interminable opening montage of establishing tourist shots of Paris (if it had been London there would have been red phone boxes and double decker buses; not a North African mugger or traffic gridlock in sight), all to the accompaniment of Woody Allen's horn-blowing, we have Woody Allen directing a Woody Allen script in which Owen Wilson plays a writer of scripts who talks, acts and dresses like Woody Allen; after half an hour or so of by-the-numbers comic clichés about culturally insensitive Americans and pompous pseudo-intellectuals (oh the irony!) the plot stumbles into Goodnight Sweetheart territory as Woody, sorry Owen, stumbles through a time porthole into a 1920s Paris where you cannot order a coffee without Salvador Dali asking "Have you met my friends Luis Bunuel and Man Ray?" Just when you think it cannot get any crasser Woody, er Owen, er Woody, trowels on a Hallmark moral about living in the present before ditching his materialistic American girlfriend to take up with a French chick who shares his love of walking in the rain...