a little bit of magic

Film Lauren Wilcox of The Washington Post compares Woody Allen's vision of New York with the reality and finds that the two aren't entirely incompatible and a little bit of magic can happen:

Despite the bar's high-tone clubbiness, it felt convivial, more like a place where people came to see others than to be seen. The patrons were, I thought, a fair approximation of the ritzy creative types that had frequented the bar in "Radio Days," passing the time with an unselfconscious pleasure that would, in retrospect, become nostalgia. It seemed like the kind of place, at the kind of time, that people would one day miss bitterly.

The problem with films about Liverpool is that all too often they're desperate to show the reality, or at least a version of it, not wanting to show that it is somewhere that can be as romantic as anywhere else. And if someone mentions Letter to Brezhnev, I'll break this pencil.