Nostalgia

Drop a quarter in a Las Vegas machine: lights blink, bells ring and odds are your money is headed to a casino bank account. But experiencing those same effects while your funds are funneled to charity? That's definitely outside the Sin City norm. This is what happens at a little known Vegas pleasure palace, the Pinball Hall of Fame, a five-minute drive east of the Strip. The 10,000-foot cinder-block building is thought to house the largest collection of historic pinball machines operating in America.

Amateur collectors worked the crowd for limited editions, warning against giving away potentially valuable bills. One doomsaying politician called for a return to the discarded currency. And people of all ages waited patiently to turn in their forgotten, worn-out francs. A decade after being pushed aside by the euro, the franc on Friday officially became a relic. It was the last day to exchange old currency for euros, and the event attracted hundreds to the Bank of France in Paris, the only location in the capital able to convert the colorful bills.

Woody Allen's 45th feature, "Midnight in Paris," centers on Owen Wilson's character, Gil, the latest in a long line of Woody stand-in figures and, inarguably, one of the best. While in Paris with his fiancée and her parents, Gil, a would-be novelist, gushes about the City of Light — not its present-day incarnation, mind you. Gil dreams of living in the Paris of the 1920s, joining the movable feast that included Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Picasso. Those in Gil's circle roundly dismiss his pining for the past.

Gil Pender, the tousle-haired, khaki-clad hero of Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," is a writer struggling to finish a novel about a man who works in a "nostalgia shop. " That's another way of saying that both Pender, played by Owen Wilson, and his protagonist have something in common with Allen, whose antiquarian tastes are well known. And something in common, for that matter, with Terrence Malick, who structured his newest film, the ponderous, gorgeous "The Tree of Life," in large part to test similar ideas about the pull and power of the past.

The future of television lies squarely in the past, preferably on a bed with a blond bombshell. That's where you'll find Nick, the hero of NBC's upcoming 1960s drama "The Playboy Club," who's described by one lady friend as "everything you want and everything you don't. " With his well-oiled hair and sharply creased pocket square, he looks like he just stepped out of an ad designed by Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Surrounded by a gaggle of pink-eared, cotton-tailed friends, Nick lives in a world where, as Hugh Hefner's voice-over explains, "everything was perfect, where life was magic, where ... fantasies became realities for everyone who walked through the door.

Marcel Proust had his madeleines, delicate confections whose mere taste stirred up powerful private memories. Americans have movies and television shows, and the personal associations we ascribe to rewatching "Casablanca" or "Star Wars," or seeing an old TV clip of "Columbo," can be as piquant as the scent of popcorn. This summer at LACMA, Christian Marclay's cinematic artwork "The Clock" (2010), a 24-hour-long compilation of thousands of film and TV clips, will offer remembrances of Hollywood matinees past.

'Nostalgia for the Light' Unrated Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes Playing: At Nuart, West Los Angeles

Duran Duran — the seminal 1980s music outfit that emerged from Birmingham, England, to dominate the global pop scene with cinematic music videos for a catalog of catchy, guitar-inflected, groove-laden synth pop hit singles — has endured. It's a fact that's come as something of a pleasant surprise to the members of the band's current lineup, vocalist Simon Le Bon, bass player John Taylor, keyboardist Nick Rhodes and drummer Roger Taylor, four of the group's five founders. The group performs at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio on Sunday.