Miss Worcester diner in Worcester, MA

The first time I visited Boston, I was 9 years old. I'd read about the harbor and Paul Revere's house in school history books, so my parents were happy to satisfy the history buff in me. I went again as a teenager, had lunch at the Atlantic Fish Market with family, browsed the Harvard Book Store in Harvard Square. I loved what I saw and vowed to move there for college (Harvard, of course!), where I would walk along beautiful tree-lined streets with books tucked under my arm like a preppy co-ed.

Well, I spent three full years at school in the Boston area -- three very distinctive and intense years. Having grown up in New York City, my first year there was spent being mildly annoyed at how early the local Starbucks closed and how early the T stopped running. My second year, I grew to hate both Massachusetts and my school in the isolation I had created for myself by signing up for too many classes and too many extracurriculars. In my final year, I hobnobbed with a new crowd, one that allowed me to feel more myself than I'd ever felt and let me see an entirely different side of Boston -- one of gritty glamour, but pure joy.

When I was just 2 or 3 months old, my father was sent on a business trip to Scandinavia. He spent close to a month there and dragged this huge doll (she's wearing my old clothes) back on the plane with him from Copenhagen, Denmark to New York City for me.

It's Father's Day ... I don't really have much to say about my father on this day -- not because I don't have a good relationship with him, but because he is such a great father that I don't think words could capture the appreciation I have for him. What I do have are memories.

I remember times in my early youth when, in the dark and quiet of my room at night, I would cry because I was so aware of what my father sacrificed for me. (I was a bit morbid as a child.) It's heartbreaking to think of it now, because I was far too young to be so worried and feel so indebted to my father for small things. One random Tuesday or Wednesday, he pulled me out of school early to take me out for lunch and to see "Beauty and the Beast." We missed the beginning of the movie because we were so busy enjoying the best turkey sandwiches ever, so we laid low after the movie was over and stayed in the theatre until the next showing started.

I have an even earlier memory of my father picking me up from preschool because my mother couldn't, when I was 3 or 4. He had to leave work early, and on the ride home, we drove through some hilly areas. At the top of one hill, he let go of the steering wheel and fooled me into thinking he didn't have his foot on the brake pedal. I remember laughing with glee and thinking my father was just the best.

Taylor Swift wrote a song for her mother on her "Fearless" album called "The Best Day" (which I think I also posted in my Mother's Day entry). That song reminds me not of my mother, but of my father, because so many of my best childhood memories are with him. My father was the one who brought me to the movies, who sat with me through what must've been the dullest plotlines ever, who drove me to and from piano lessons, ice skating classes, dance recitals and friends' homes.


Sometimes, when I stop to think about it, I worry that my respect, admiration and appreciation for my father never shows and that he will never know how grateful I am for him. If I ever become a mother, I hope I am even a fraction as patient or giving with my children as my father has been with me. We're not a family of grand gestures or deep confessions, so I try every day to reciprocate the love that he has shown me and I hope that my actions say what I cannot.

This isn't a movie I would have normally seen in theatres. For starters, Owen Wilson has a major role in it. And it's a Woody Allen film (I have nothing against him, but ... let's just say I've never paid to watch one). I'd skimmed a few noncommittal reviews from NPR and The New York Times and the premise piqued my interest enough to say "yes" when a friend asked me if I wanted to see it. Apparently skimming reviews is not the same as actually reading reviews, because I had no idea that the element of time travel would be woven into the storyline.

Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams) in one of her very many shirt dress and leather belt combos

The film starts out with a montage of clichéd Parisian tourist scenes that heavily overstays its welcome. I want to say the montage goes on for upwards of ten minutes. The viewer is then assaulted by an overly-obnoxious Rachel McAdams in the role of Inez, a wealthy and vacuous all-American beauty (McAdams is in fact Canadian) who has an alarming penchant for preppy shirt dresses accessorized by loosely-fitting leather belts and wedge sandals. And here I thought I would be offended by Owen Wilson, but McAdams does such an excellent job of overacting the annoying Inez that I find myself hating the actress herself and her multitude of shirt dresses in various preppy colors (aka white, cornflower blue, rinse and repeat).

Gil joins Inez and her stuffy friends, Paul (Michael Sheen) and Carol (Nina Arianda) for a wine tasting

Wilson, by comparison, is charmingly loopy in his portrayal of Gil Pender, Inez's dreamer screenwriter-cum-novelist fiancé. Gil is in the midst of working on a novel about a nostalgia shop and fantasizes about quitting his job and moving to Paris to write. The couple is in Paris for a reason I can no longer remember, and while Gil is entranced by the beauty and romance of the city, Inez fills her vacation with spots of faux-highbrow culture and antiquing for her and Gil's future home. She is often accompanied by her college pal Paul (Michael Sheen), an insufferably (but comically) self-centered "intellectual" and his female friend Carol (Nina Arianda), who arguably turns out to be the most refreshing and sympathetic character in the entire film.

Feeling as claustrophobic as the viewer does, Gil decides one night to take leave of his fiancée and walk the streets of Paris alone. He eventually finds himself lost ... this is when the fun finally begins.

Without explanation (causing the audience to burst into cheerful giggles), something that resembles a T-model Ford follows two modern-day automobiles around a cobblestoned bend and stops before Gil. The doors fly open and a bevy of revelers, armed with champagne, shout and motion at him until he bewilderedly stumbles into the car.

Gil Pender hobnobs with Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill)

They take him to a decadent party where everyone is dressed in 1920s garb. Naturally, Gil gravitates towards two Americans ... who turn out to be (F.) Scott Fitzgerald and his garrulous wife Zelda. And Cole Porter. The Fitzgeralds overlook Gil's modern day idiosyncrasies and welcome him into their social circle, leading Gil through 1920s Paris, which he embraces with just as little resistance. The magical night comes to an end as he leaves a bar in which he has just met Ernest Hemingway, and the bar transforms into a laundromat.

Over the course of the next few days (or nights, as it were), Gil rubs elbows with many of his literary idols and their friends: Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin ... the list goes on and on. Gil is completely enchanted by his idols, but as it turns out, it is not a literary figure or celebrity who grabs his attention -- it's Picasso's muse, Adriana (Marion Cotillard).

It takes a couple of awkward scenes for Gil to figure out that he is in fact in love with someone from a different time and place and not with his wife-to-be, Inez. (Who could argue with that when Woody Allen has made the contrast so extreme?) Gil decides to try his best to win Adriana over after discovering that she has feelings for him, chronicled in a published copy of her diary he finds at a bookstand along the Seine.

Gil takes to Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Picasso's muse

It seems everything is going to plan until Adriana falls victim to the very same plot twist that has brought Gil to the 1920s. Together, Gil and Adriana find themselves in "La Belle Epoque," Adriana's own era of choice. Like Gil, Adriana chooses what she sees as a more "glorified" era over her own reality. Ironically, it is this twist that makes Gil come to his senses and leave both Adriana and the past behind. The film draws to a close in a less fantastical but no less cheesy way, but don't worry, I won't give everything away.

The film is quirky, lighthearted and charmant in a way that requires the viewer to suspend his or her disbelief and accept the film at close to face value. But it's chock full of playful literary and cultural references, and equally full of delightful bit performances from an all-star cast, including Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, and even the French president's wife, Carla Bruni. We only really get to scratch at the surface of each of the infamous characters, but perhaps the whimsical fantasy is best left a mystery.