All my optimism was an illusion.

Magic in the Moonlight

(2014)

(SPOILERS) I couldn’t say I’m an avid follower of Woody Allen’s films these days, mostly due the sheer variability of his output. He churns out a picture a year, come rain or shine, so Woody would have to be pretty damn consistent to follow avidly. I’ve found it increasingly takes a lot more to disguise the sound of his voice than it did, and a general air of repetition that has crept in. I guess that’s partly down to him being (almost) 80 and all, but no one is asking him to work so much. Anyone would think he was Clint Eastwood. It’s probably also partly because it’s easier to accept his offerings when he is on screen himself; there’s less chance of mimicry or surrogates. Magic in the Moonlight is a decidedly tepid affair. Its title suggests likeable whimsy, which scored him a big hit recently, but its closer to the rusty period trappings that made Match Point such a risible chore.

That’s a bit unfair, maybe. There’s little Woody has done that’s quite that bad (that I’ve seen anyway; I’ve yet to catch the Ewan McGregor one), but for a director whose approach to dialogue has never been modernistic, it’s curious how jarring his treatment of period can sound (here 1928). It worked in Midnight in Paris as that was a playful, colloquial take on the worship of artistry, and very charming for it. When period is combined with the industry of make-believe (The Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway) the homages tend to work. Here, during the early stages, where Colin Firth is introduced as irascible stage musician Wei Ling Soo, there’s a similar sense of the broad and heightened that carries amusingly enough.

It’s when Soo’s real persona Stanley Crawford investigates the case of spiritualist Sophie Baker (Emma Stone) that Allen slowly begins to come unstuck. Allen only has one plotline, and it’s at least one too few; non-believer Stanley slowly falling in love with the woman who makes him believe again. The belief/non-belief is a metaphor for finding true love (at one point a character even says, “Love at first sight is a kind of magic”), but it doesn’t really excuse how thinly filled in Crawford’s status as a Houdini/James Randi-esque (although it appears Allen was inspired by William Ellsworth Robinson) debunker of fake mediums is. It suggests Allen couldn’t be bothered to go to any great effort to underpin his plot.

Despite his arch-scepticism, it takes very little to convince Stanley her fakery is the real deal. Of course we know, this being Woody Allen, that the plot isn’t suddenly going to about face and indulge the thought that something else might be out there, any more than he’s going to deliver a script with no mention of psychiatry. Both of those come with a caveat; unless he’s beginning to get sentimental or senile in his dotage.

Allen and cinematographer Darius Khondji make the South of France look gorgeous, but that same warmth is lacking in the screenplay. With this title, one might have expected something closer to the frippery of A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Unfortunately, 100 minutes is too long to have Firth, good as he is, puffing and gruffing away in an uptight acerbic fashion while Stone, who I’m usually a fan of, is not quite at ease, ill-served by the rictus nature of Allen’s characterisations. Unsurprising, as he’s stuck in the same routine as he was 40 years ago. I also wasn't remotely rooting for Firth and Stone to get together, even though I usually relish a 30-year age gap in a love story. I didn’t once buy that they had any real affection for each other; there’s certainly no romantic chemistry there.

This needed to be light and frothy, but instead it drags. If Sophie and Stanley had been but one of a trio of mismatched couples finding love, the flaws in the screenplay might have been less evident and the whole might have been significantly more appealing. Supporting players (Marcia Gay Harden, Simon McBurney) are reliable but nothing more than that. Allen’s obsessions are much less endearing when revealed in such an unfiltered fashion. It’s as if he’s running on empty, his formulaic approach relieving him of putting any extra effort into making his scenario credible or his characters likeable.

Comments

Believe me, Mr Bond, I could shoot you from Stuttgart und still create ze proper effect.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
(SPOILERS) Some of the reactions to Spectre would have you believe it undoes all the “good” work cementing Daniel Craig’s incarnation of Bond in Skyfall. If you didn’t see that picture as the second coming of the franchise (I didn’t) your response to the latest may not be so harsh, despite its less successful choices (Blofeld among them). And it isn’t as if one step, forward two steps back are anything new in perceptions of the series (or indeed hugely divisive views on what even constitutes a decent Bond movie). After the raves greeting Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan suffered a decidedly tepid response to his second outing, Tomorrow Never Dies, albeit it was less eviscerated than Craig’s sophomore Quantum of Solace. Tomorrow’s reputation disguises many strong points, although it has to be admitted that a Moore-era style finale and a floundering attempt to package in a halcyon villain aren’t among them.

The Bond series’ flirtations with contemporary relevance have a…

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

I still think it’s a terrible play, but it makes a wonderful rehearsal.

Room Service (1938)
(SPOILERS) The Marx Brothers step away from MGM for a solitary RKO outing, and a scarcely disguised adaption of a play to boot. Room Service lacks the requisite sense of anarchy and inventiveness of their better (earlier) pictures – even Groucho’s name, Gordon Miller, is disappointingly everyday – but it’s nevertheless an inoffensive time passer.

This better not be some 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea shit, man.

Underwater (2020)
(SPOILERS) There’s no shame in a quality B-movie, or in an Alien rip-off done well. But it’s nevertheless going to need that something extra to make it truly memorable in its own right. Underwater, despite being scuppered at the box office, is an entirely respectable entry in both those arenas from director William Eubank, but like the recent Life (which, in fairness, had an ending that very nearly elevated it to the truly memorable), it can’t quite go that extra mile, or summon that much needed sliver of inspiration to set it apart.

Time wounds all heels.

Go West (1940)
(SPOILERS) Comedy westerns were nothing new when the Marx Brothers succumbed – Buster Keaton had made one with the same title fifteen years earlier – but theirs served to underline how variable the results could be. For every Bob Hope (Son of Paleface) there’s a Seth McFarlane (A Million Ways to Die in the West). In theory, the brothers riding roughshod over such genre conventions ought to have been uproarious, but they’d rather run out of gas by this point, and the results are, for the most part, sadly pedestrian. Even Go West's big train-chase climax fails to elicit the once accustomed anarchy that was their stock in trade.

Shall we bind the deal with a kiss? Or, five dollars in cash? You lose either way.

The Big Store (1941)
(SPOILERS) Three go mad in a department store. The results are undoubtedly more diverting than low point Go West, but it feels as if there is even more flotsam to wade through to get to the good stuff in The Big Store, which is almost exclusively delivered by Groucho as private detective and bodyguard Wolf J Flywheel. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the climax is one of the better ones, an extended chase sequence through the store that is frequently quite inventive.

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s Jaws, there’s Star Wars, and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy, to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “mainly boring”.

Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the system when Burton did it (even…

Goodbye, Mr Chimps.

At the Circus (1939)
(SPOILERS) This is where the brothers sink into their stretch of middling MGM movies, now absent the presence of their major supporter Irving Thalberg; it’s probably for the best this wasn’t called A Day at the Circus, as it would instantly have drawn unflattering comparisons with the earlier MGM pair that gave them their biggest hits. Nevertheless, there’s enough decent material to keep At the Circus fairly sprightly (rather than “fairly ponderous”, as Pauline Kael put it).

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

Never compare me to the mayor in Jaws! Never!

Ghostbusters (2016)
(SPOILERS) Paul Feig is a better director than Ivan Reitman, or at very least he’s savvy enough to gather technicians around him who make his films look good, but that hasn’t helped make his Ghostbusters remake (or reboot) a better movie than the original, and that’s even with the original not even being that great a movie in the first place.

Along which lines, I’d lay no claims to the 1984 movie being some kind of auteurist gem, but it does make some capital from the polarising forces of Aykroyd’s ultra-geekiness on the subject of spooks and Murray’s “I’m just here for the asides” irreverence. In contrast, Feig’s picture is all about treating the subject as he does any other genre, be it cop, or spy, or romcom. There’s no great affection, merely a reliably professional approach, one minded to ensure that a generous quota of gags (on-topic not required) can be pumped out via abundant improv sessions.

So there’s nothing terribly wrong with Ghostbusters, but aside from …

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog