FRANCE 24: Cannes Kicks Off With a Time-Travel Film by Woody Allen – and It's Good!

Everyone knows the French love Woody Allen. Hence the two journalists who tried to elbow me out of the way on line for the press screening of Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”, the festival’s opening film.
 
Not so fast. This self-avowed Woody Allen fan was, like many others, waiting in an already-scorching morning sun, head filled with questions. Would Woody pull off a good movie after the insipid “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger?” Would the City of Lights inspire him? Would the film be filled with touristy clichés that have nothing to do with the reality of the French capital? Would he be kind with Parisians or paint them as the stuffy, pretentious snobs of the final episodes of “Sex and the City” and countless other US movies and TV shows? And would French First Lady Carla Bruni humiliate herself onscreen?