I thought it was alright. Nothing special really and pretty lightweight. Enjoyment from all the recognized allusions, but beyond the introduction to the theme of an unachievable romantic past, I didn't take too much away.

I never quite bought Owen Wilson's disillusionment with the romantic past. It came too quickly and with minimal development. I think it's a pretty deep theme though, that the romantic past is impossible except for the person who creates it. 

I can't sit here and invoke the romance of pastoral french poetry because that's not my life. However, were I to find some way of connecting it to my present, to instill it into mundane reality, then some day I'll look back at this moment now and think wow, that really happened to me. 

So what is romance? Why do we so easily fall into Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their worlds? Is it because we know it's fantasy, not entirely different from Tolkien and Lewis? Is it because we're painfully aware that our realities are so far removed from bull fighting and literary salons? 

But we know because of those that came before us that we can make it too. That if they put such truth down on paper solidified, then can't we instill our lives with that same truth? I think romance is only so good as it teaches us how to feel in the moment and to wish too nostalgically for an impossible history is the bastardization of the message, that right now, if you make it so, you are in the romantic present. 

right now i'm up high. city's fogged up like i imagine sleepyhollow is. light's almost gone and people's apartments windows are lit up yellow ambient, mine is too but not everyone's is. My speakers low key, with running keys over buzzy bass. The rain's probably going to start and i'm at my desk with a mug of coffee thinking about this great big arm chair to my right. I graduated this week. Am I content right now? the music is in a chorus of "congratulations, a great big congratulations." 

Is this romantic yet?

I don't think that Owen Wilson is disillusioned by the romantic, or the greatness of the past. It is true that he realizes through Adrianna that the “Golden Times” are subjective and rarely belong to the present, but the realization and choice of not transposing his being into living permanently in the past comes from purely hypochondriac and typical Woody Allen's motives- there is not antibiotics and modern medications.

Here is a nice excerpt of Freud about Golden Times, which is very enlightening as to this movie:

“Remote times have a great attraction- sometimes mysteriously so- for the imagination. As often as mankind is dissatisfied with its present- and that happens often enough- it harks back to the past and hopes at last to win belief in the never forgotten dream of a Golden Age. Probably man stand under the magic spell of his childhood, which a not unbiased memory presents to him as a time of unalloyed bliss. Incomplete and dim memories of the past, which we call tradition, are a great incentive to the artist, for he is free to fill in the gaps in the memories according to the behest of his imagination and to form after his own purpose the image of the time he has undertaken to reproduce.” (Freud, Moses and Monotheism)

 It is interesting that Freud talks about the “magic spell of childhood” and that Woody Allen's golden age is in the twenties- in a way, the childhood of the cinema.