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This is the End

Remember when the end of the world was a scary concept? Now it’s merely a banal one, at least in movies, where it seems to be the plot premise of half the summer’s blockbusters. So a parody was inevitable.

Before Midnight

Made in 1995, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise was a deceptively simple film about the power of words and the lure of love, in which an American played by Ethan Hawke and a Frenchwoman played by Julie Delphy meet while travelling in Vienna. Knowing that their trains will take them in opposite directions in a few hours, they decide to spend that time together, and their conversation is colored by that limitation. The sequel, 2004’s Before Sunset, finds an excuse to bring Jesse and Celine back together, and though it appears to be a replay of the earlier movie, it is fundamentally different in that the pair have begun what they think of as their lives, and must decide if they want to make a very jarring change in those lives by becoming a couple.



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