The plot:

A romantic comedy about an American family traveling to the French capital for business. The party includes a young engaged couple. Gil and his fiancée, Inez, are in Paris, having a vacation with family and by chance with friends. Gil is a successful but dissatisfied Hollywood screenwriter, now working on his first novel. Inez and the others are very demeaning both to Gil and the idea of him writing a novel.

While alone walking at night, Gil gets in a car with some friendly strangers. Gil soon discovers he has been transported to the 1920s, an era he admires and idolizes in his to-be-novel. While there, he encounters and interacts with famous literary icons and artists who help him with his novel and his life.

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And here is the lesson to remember from this movie…

In the end he discovers that longing for a “golden past” is a recurring theme of any time period, as some prefer to be nostalgic about a romanticized past rather than accepting the messy present and uncertain future.

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When we read about the lives of the great achievers of the past, we are often impressed with their accomplishments. What we fail to realize is that many of them had their own struggles and daily frustrations to deal with.

Just like us!

The grass always seems to be greener elsewhere.

But is it really?

The challenge at any given time (or era) is to use the resources that are available to us in the best possible way.

And before you start making excuses, try to rembember this quote from Jackson Brown, the writer,

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per daythat were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein.”
 

File:Paul cezanne 1861.jpg

 

Paul Cézanne]; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century’s new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne “is the father of us all” cannot be easily dismissed.

Cézanne’s work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, tone, composition and draftsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature. The paintings convey Cézanne’s intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

Source, Wikipedia, January 19, 2011

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He lived approximately 24 725 days…

Here are some of his creations. There are more to admire on Wikipedia.org

File:Paul Cézanne, Les joueurs de carte (1892-95).jpg

File:Cézanne, Paul - Still Life with a Curtain.jpg