Re.MiP
Had a discussion with Raaga Suresh in Twitter:

I wonder why some have this issue over picture postcardly Paris.. He's no Spike Lee to bother about N-E arrondissements. This unsatisfactory feeling of Owen Wilson not getting his pocket picked at nights and/or sodomized by tall, dark, African men. Imagine the possibility of seeing such a world in a WA film. 'Match point' comes close, must have been a triumph for WA..

But this is a WA film. Dangers of the present/real are pre-empted by ideal/fantasy. Usually with a special caveat, that it isn't possible, we still straddle on.. More to the point, 'he' still straddles on. His oeuvre very specifically is about this lack of 'ideal' at large..

The romanticism of the 'present' is tied to the past, so how could WA endorse 'this age' at its purest level? It is about WA, like all his films, the propensity to value written word above all, stuck in that fantasy of the high lit, but still tackling the characters & existential issues in the present, personal but by virtues of WA's own self, phantasmagoric.. filtered through his influences, taking choices that eludes confines of the real, subconsciously governed by the past fantasy. Ultimately it closes the loop with the very impossibility of ideal, when the past seems fantasized by its own past.

And within all that, it's the modernists, the ones of the 'image' above all else, who clearly visualize & truly absorb the scenario at an elevated plane.. This isn't underlined but It is with this predicament, WA straddles in real, governed by fantasy, in visual storytelling & not written form. Wilson must embrace his screenwriting, he is living it.