Midnight In Paris is yet another delight from Woody Allen. Gil (Owen Wilson) serves as the “Woody Allen character,” a disgruntled Hollywood screenwriter who dreams of reaching a higher level of literary genius by writing a novel. Unfortunately, he is engaged to a pushy girl, Inez (Rachel McAdams), who loves big diamonds and even bigger houses in Malibu.

The setting is Paris, as Gil and Inez freeload on her father’s five-star business trip. But Gil has a different Paris in mind: the Paris of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the rest of the expatriate crowd of the 1920s. Gil’s nostalgic delusions lead him to his true literary purpose in life, and, of course, to his real romantic passion.

Paris + Woody Allen + hottie Marion Cotillard + The First Lady of France (as a tour guide) + Adrien Brody (as Salvador Dalí) = a film more worthwhile than anything Steven Spielberg could produce or Brad Pitt could star in.

- Haley Hogan

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So now that I have returned to Paris, after four months of being back in the United States, I am appreciating all that the French have to offer. Except for one thing — their obsession with critiquing you on your appearance. It’s a severely gauche cultural trait that they think is totally normal and acceptable.

Yes, along with their insistence that smoking is healthy and critical to being cool, the French love to tell their friends, family, and vague acquaintances, if they have gained weight, lost weight, gotten “fat,” gotten ugly, or whatever.

So when I arrived in Paris I saw my ex-boyfriend for a coffee, and he told me (in French — I have translated the evil phrase for your convenience), “Your thighs have gotten bigger.” Then there was a long awkward silence, and he continued, “You’ve been doing sports. I notice everything about you!” He felt so satisfied with himself–like he had discovered a new kind of cheese. But seriously, where does an ex-boyfriend get off telling you that anything has gotten bigger on your body? He is a wanker, and I am leaving it at that. I am not going to develop a complex about my body just because some crazy Parisian who smokes a pack a day thinks that from some bizarre angle my thighs have gotten “big and athletic.”

Yes, I admit that I have been doing more squats, yoga, and exercise videos since I returned to the US, but why should I feel attacked by this puny, effeminate little French dude? I promise you that I don’t feel attacked — I only feel pissed off at the French, as usual.

- Haley Hogan

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I saw the new Basquiat show at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and it made me think about celebrity. A Brooklyn-born boy of Puerto Rican and Haitian descent, Jean-Michel Basquiat became a star in the art world because he was a talented graffiti artist who caught the attention of some gallery owners.

His work is intentionally juvenile, charged with symbolism about slavery, racism, downtown New York, art, and identity. I enjoyed a lot of it, but then I just looked at an old white refrigerator, scribbled with a few of Basquiat’s signature markings, and I thought to myself, “Basquiat is famous for the same reason any contemporary artist is famous–because he has a distinctive look (or “brand,” as you could call it), and because he was lucky enough to get discovered by the right gallery owner (who probably had a crush on him).”

At the end of the day, Basquiat’s story is a tragic one (he died of a drug overdose at age 28), but it represents the rise of celebrity in America. If you can act like a hot icon who has something that no one else does, then you can schmooze your way to the top. More likely than not, Basquiat just rode his way to the top, on the way of commercialism that had become the 1980s art market.

- Haley Hogan

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I just moved to Manhattan, but the city has already sufficiently bruised and beaten me. Well, I am just complaining because I still don’t have a job. Now people are telling me that I should be a waiter or a nanny. That’s exactly what I did in Paris because I was foreign and couldn’t get a better job. And that’s exactly why I left Paris to move to New York. You could call it irony, but I just call it cruelty.

So I decided to abort ship and fly back to Paris to get lost in a pain au chocolat, the beautiful autumnal light in the Tuileries Gardens, and some bottles of red wine. What am I expecting to happen during my sojourn in Paris? I am expecting that I will be totally useless for a couple of weeks and then return to New York to plunge back into reality. But at least I will have revived my soul. New Yorkers don’t think about that a lot — their souls, their spirits, their level of true pleasure. Parisians think about those things all the time.

I was tired of hearing the same diatribe from all my Manhattan friends: “You have to fight to the death to get the job you want! You have to spend every waking minute stalking people down and personally handing them your resume! Then you have to send them and their assistants cupcakes! Then you have to mail them a hand-written note to follow up! Then you have to offer them your first-born child!” In Paris, it’s kind of like, “What do you feel like eating tonight?” and “I hear there’s a good art exhibit at the Pompidou. Maybe we’ll go.” There aren’t so many SHOULDS in Paris as there are in New York. So I am in Paris avoiding THE SHOULD.

- Haley Hogan

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France has been absorbed in a convoluted scandal starring Liliane Bettencourt (the billionaire heiress of the L’Oreal fortune), her daughter, a gigolo photographer, and now, President Sarkozy.

It started when the heiress’ daughter filed suit against her geriatric mother and complained that the aforementioned gigolo photog, Francois Marie-Banier, was seducing the old lady so that she would shower him with 1 billion euros worth of gifts — including an island in the Seychelles.

The plot thickened when a former butler came forward with tapes of secret conversations between Bettencourt and her money manager that suggest tax evasion. Next, a former bookkeeper told police he had seen Bettencourt slip 150,000 euros in cash to Sarkozy’s Labour Minister, as a donation for the president’s 2007 election campaign.

Let Bettencourt enjoy her last years of the luxe life  (perhaps she and her gigolo are sunbathing somewhere in the Seychelles right now). The rest is just another story of corrupt French politics.

- Lizzie Crocker

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I have always been obsessed by glass houses, and even more so by the people who inhabit them. Robert Rubin is a total pimp and a collector of something even more exciting than fine art … fine architecture.

After Rubin got rich on Wall Street, he was able to pursue his real passion for collecting, and his most exorbitant investment thus far was the Maison de Verre, an iconic Modernist house made of glass hidden behind an 18th-century city block in Paris. I got a chance to take a private tour with a bunch of nerdy architects and PhD students whose eyes lit up at the site of the panels of illuminated 1920s glass and the lacquered revolving doors.

It must be strange for Robert Rubin and his New York family to live in the former doctor’s office and residence of a bourgeois Parisian gynecologist. But any modern architecture geek would do the same.

- Haley Hogan

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Yesterday I had a refreshing break from the evil Parisians who seem to despise me and seize any chance they get to be rude to my face. After I had a riff with some xenophobic Frenchmen at lunch, I was strolling past the old-school, pink VW van of a charming pizzeria in the Marais. It was lit with romantic twinkle lights and pink flamingo decorations for dinner.

I peered inside the van to find an adorable couple drinking wine and nibbling on a prosciutto pizza. The pretty blonde woman exclaimed, “Isn’t this the greatest?!” She knew I was American because I had been gauchely ogling the interior of the van. Then she said, “Oh my god, can you take a picture of us? I just arrived from Los Angeles, and of course, I packed everything in my closet except for my camera!” She asked if I had Facebook, and before I knew it, she was scribbling her name down and I was snapping a photo of her and her Frenchie beau.

When people are friendly, the world works so simply — like eating pizza by the light of a glowing flamingo in a converted 1960s van.

- Haley Hogan

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I recently received an expensive camera as a belated birthday gift, and it makes HD-quality videos, so basically, I can shoot my very own vodka advertisements, and other important things like that for Youtube.

But filmmaking is hard. Apparently even Woody Allen, the miniature king of cinema, does not yet have sufficient funding for his next film, Midnight in Paris. It’s supposed to start shooting this month in Paris with Rachel McAdams, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, and France’s first lady, Carla Bruni.

Not even the pimpest director in Hollywood and a cast of super-egos can brave the trenches of the financial crisis. Or maybe Woody’s just busy blowing his funds on expensive Parisian apartment rentals and foie gras for the under-21 club.

- Haley Hogan

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I was dining at a chic Parisian restaurant when I heard the abrasive, American voice of a drunk girl. I turned my head to find Tara Reid, the D-List celebrity who is famous for partying too much and exposing her naughty bits to the paparazzi. She was in a popular, raunchy teen movie about 100 years ago and has been riding on that sub-fame wave ever since.

Most recently, she has been in the tabloids for being disgustingly thin again, and when I decided to approach her for an autograph (just for the idiotic, gauche rush of it). Tara seemed very disoriented when I politely asked for her to sign my notebook. She had trouble maneuvering my pen and spelling out my name. I think it was due to the fact that she hadn’t consumed solids in a couple of months, and all the champagne (and pseudo-fame) was going straight to her bleach-blonde head.

P.S. Neither of the blonde transvestites in the above photo is Tara Reid, in case you were jumping to the natural conclusion.

- Haley Hogan

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I went out for a girl’s night at Bus Palladium, an old-school nightclub in Paris. There was a private party/concert and Johnny Depp was apparently on the premises. My friends and I snuck ourselves in and enjoyed the mediocre, Jim-Morrison-inspired live music and amusing dance scene.

But the real drama took place when we left the club and started walking home. A few obnoxious guys began cat-calling us from their car. Fed up with the offensive French tradition of harassing girls in skirts (it’s way worse in Paris than in the United States), I flew off the handle and started to yell at them. In retrospect, not my brightest idea.

The troop of major creepers drove up onto the sidewalk, jumped out of their car, and continued to verbally abuse us. Before I knew it we were in a full-on screaming match in the middle of the street. They threatened to call the police on me, accusing me of denting their car door with my high heels. One of them kicked me in the stomach, and I thought to myself:

1.  Chivalry is dead

2.  These guys are not interested in robbing or raping us — they’re merely interested in fighting wit a couple of American girls.

3.  Maybe next time I go out I should leave my balls at home so that I don’t get kicked in the ovaries.

- Haley Hogan

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