The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Directed by Woody Allen
Cecilia is a waitress in New Jersey, living a dreary life during the Great Depression. Her only escape from her mundane reality is the movie theatre. After losing her job, Cecilia goes to see 'The Purple Rose of Cairo' in hopes of raising her spirits, where she watches dashing archaeologist Tom Baxter time and again.
9 connections found
View:
9 connections, in both directions
What critics compared The Purple Rose of Cairo to
Intelligent, insightful, and inspired in ways that recall Allen's best movies (cue, yes, nostalgia), it's playful and absurd, evoking Annie Hall and The Purple Rose of Cairo, but it also firmly reminds us that Allen is as vital as ever, with so much still to say about art and love and quietly desperate moments, even if it comes wrapped in his ever-familiar box.
One must submit to relaxed rhythms of “Midnight in Paris”, which definitely echoes back some to Allen’s own “The Purple Rose of Cairo”, but that’s not at all a difficult task.
A magical-realist gem harking back to "The Purple Rose of Cairo," "Midnight" is a bit thin and glib to call a masterpiece - at 75, Allen is unlikely to have another one of those in him - but it's still a delicious trifle for anyone who has ever dreamt of bantering about the cinema with Luis Buñuel or lounging at the piano to hear Cole Porter sing "Let's Do It."
Large portions of Midnight in Paris reminded me more of A Night at the Museum than The Purple Rose of Cairo.
It’s a charming, fanciful comedy in the vein of “Bullets over Broadway” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” the kind of movie I honestly thought Woody had lost the knack for.
Allen just breezes past all that, the way he did in his great The Purple Rose of Cairo and, before that, in his 1977 short story ?The Kugelmass Episode.? Actually, the twenties scenes recall another Allen story, ?A Twenties Memory,? which is full of passages as blissful as this: ?Hemingway had just finished two short stories about prize fighting, and while Gertrude Stein and I both thought they were decent, we agreed they still needed much work ?
The neurotic premise invites comparison to some prime Woody Allen features (The Purple Rose of Cairo, anyone?); the ending echoes Charlie Kaufman's stronger works without ever quite reaching his dizzying heights; and supporting players like Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas, Steve Coogan, and Alia Shawkat generally find themselves relegated to the sidelines.
In a way, there’s as much Frankenstein to the story as there is The Purple Rose of Cairo.
From its space politics, where Grand Councilwoman (Zoe Caldwell, "The Purple Rose of Cairo") sentences based on an individual's worth to society, to its themes of broken homes forming wide-reaching families, "Lilo & Stitch" has something for everyone.
Kevin McDonald ("The Ladies Man," "Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy"), Zoe Caldwell ("The Purple Rose of Cairo") and Jason Scott Lee ("Soldier," "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story") round out the other major characters and all do fine work.
As an added bonus, Frozen is fronted by one of the wittiest and most inventive animated shorts in a long time, Lauren MacMullan's Get A Horse! debuted to rave responses at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend preceding the screenings of Gravity, Horse begins as an early black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoon but then bursts its boundaries into color and 3D in marvelously antic ways that call to mind the stepping-off-the-screen techniques of Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. and Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Advertisement
Some might also notice similarities to Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, although this is essentially that approach in reverse.
Think of it as an Inception styled Purple Rose of Cairo…
What “Enchanted” does do, however, is take an amusing peek at what might happen to a cartoon princess should she suddenly find herself in real-world Manhattan — think of it as “The Purple Rose of Cairo” for kids.
In the almost 75 years since Thurber’s story was published, we’ve had plenty of films, everything from Brazil to The Purple Rose of Cairo, that have expressed the sometimes poignant divide between our drab realities and our lively inner worlds.
Advertisement
It’s awkward, but this puts Anderson in a position similar to the one that pre-scandal Woody Allen once held in the 1980s and ’90s, in the days of Hannah and Her Sisters , Crimes and Misdemeanors , and The Purple Rose of Cairo .