In Contention

Tag: Corey Stoll

  • 8/29 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: ‘Help’ detractors racist?, Stoll on Hemingway, ‘Dangerous Method’ buzz

    Welcome to the new season…

    • “‘The Help’ isn’t racist. It’s critics are.” [The New Republic]

    • Pete Hammond takes note of indies looking to make Oscar plays this year. [Deadline]

    • Steve Pond talks to “Midnight in Paris” star Corey Stoll. [The Odds]

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  • “You don’t want the opinion of another writer.”

    One of the biggest delights of the year for me was Corey Stoll’s performance as Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” I had a giant grin on my face, ear to ear, the whole time he was on screen. So I’m glad David Poland dedicated one of his long-form interviews to the actor.

  • REVIEW: “Midnight in Paris” (**1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival
    Opening Night

    “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Nobody actually quotes L.P. Hartley in “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s often charming if largely over-explicated ode to the healing and deceiving properties of nostalgia. If they don’t, however, that could just be because a spring breeze stole the last few pages of the script at some point on the shoot of this amiably unfinished choux-pastry film, and Allen didn’t feel much like rewriting them.

    Up until that point, Allen hasn’t exactly shied away from obvious references or externalized subtext — this is a film that trades in emphatic cultural and historical caricature, a picture-book approach that will delight some viewers even as it strikes others as aggravatingly twee, but one Allen commits to with the take-it-or-leave-it dispatch of a 75 year-old master working in quick-sketch mode.

    Either way, the tourist-style filmmaking that surfaced in such recent Allen films as “Match Point” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” feels more thematically motivated in “Midnight in Paris,” a study of a character not merely a traveller in his physical surroundings, but his generational ones too. I kept wondering if the film’s narrowness of perspective was that of Allen or Owen Wilson’s Allen-substitute protagonist, and what textual difference the distinction even makes.

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