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.

Your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!

Enemy Mine (1985) (SPOILERS) The essential dynamic of Enemy Mine – sworn enemies overcome their differences to become firm friends – was a well-ploughed one when it was made, such that it led to TV Tropes assuming, since edited, that it took its title from an existing phrase (Barry Longyear, author of the 1979 novella, made it up, inspired by the 1961 David Niven film The Best of Enemies ). The Film Yearbook Volume 5 opined that that Wolfgang Petersen’s picture “ lacks the gritty sauciness of Hell in the Pacific”; John Boorman’s WWII film stranded Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune on a desert island and had them first duking it out before becoming reluctant bedfellows. Perhaps germanely, both movies were box office flops.

If I do nothing else, I will convince them that Herbert Stempel knows what won the goddam Academy Award for Best goddam Picture of 1955. That’s what I’m going to accomplish.

Quiz Show (1994) (SPOILERS) Quiz Show perfectly encapsulates a certain brand of Best Picture nominee: the staid, respectable, diligent historical episode, a morality tale in response to which the Academy can nod their heads approvingly and discerningly, feeding as it does their own vainglorious self-image about how times and attitudes have changed, in part thanks to their own virtuousness. Robert Redford’s film about the 1950s Twenty-One quiz show scandals is immaculately made, boasts a notable cast and is guided by a strong screenplay from Paul Attanasio (who, on television, had just created the seminal Homicide: Life on the Streets ), but it lacks that something extra that pushes it into truly memorable territory.

Other monks will meet their deaths here. And they too will have blackened fingers. And blackened tongues.

The Name of the Rose (1986) (SPOILERS) Umberto Eco wasn’t awfully impressed by Jean Jacques-Annaud’s adaptation of his novel – or “ palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel ” as the opening titles announce – to the extent that he nixed further movie versions of his work. Later, he amended that view, calling it “ a nice movie ”. He also, for balance, labelled The Name of the Rose his worst novel – “ I hate this book and I hope you hate it too ”. Essentially, he was begrudging its renown at the expense of his later “ superior ” novels. I didn’t hate the novel, although I do prefer the movie, probably because I saw it first and it was everything I wanted from a medieval Sherlock Holmes movie set in a monastery and devoted to forbidden books, knowledge and opinions.

You ever heard the saying, “Don’t rob the bank across from the diner that has the best donuts in three counties”?

2 Guns (2013) (SPOILERS) Denzel Washington is such a reliable performer, that it can get a bit boring. You end up knowing every gesture or inflection in advance, whether he’s playing a good guy or a bad guy. And his films are generally at least half decent, so you end up seeing them. Even in Flight (or perhaps especially in Flight ; just watch him chugging down that vodka) where he’s giving it his Oscar-nominatable best, he seems too familiar. I think it may be because he’s an actor who is more effective the less he does. In 2 Guns he’s not doing less, but sometimes it seems like it. That’s because the last person I’d ever expect blows him off the screen; Mark Wahlberg.

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

Say hello to the Scream Extractor.

Monsters, Inc. (2001) (SPOILERS) I was never the greatest fan of Monsters, Inc. , even before charges began to be levelled regarding its “true” subtext. I didn’t much care for the characters, and I particularly didn’t like the way Pixar’s directors injected their own parenting/ childhood nostalgia into their plots. Something that just seems to go on with their fare ad infinitum. Which means the Pixars I preferred tended to be the Brad Bird ones. You know, the alleged objectivist. Now, though, we learn Pixar has always been about the adrenochrome, so there’s no going back…

Piece by piece, the camel enters the couscous.

The Forgiven (2021) (SPOILERS) By this point, the differences between filmmaker John Michael McDonagh and his younger brother, filmmaker and playwright Martin McDonagh, are fairly clearly established. Both wear badges of irreverence and provocation in their writing, and a willingness to tackle – or take pot-shots – at bigger issues, ones that may find them dangling their toes in hot water. But Martin receives the lion’s share of the critical attention, while John is generally recognised as the slightly lesser light. Sure, some might mistake Seven Psychopaths for a John movie, and Calvary for a Martin one, but there’s a more flagrant sense of attention seeking in John’s work, and concomitantly less substance. The Forgiven is clearly aiming more in the expressly substantial vein of John’s earlier Calvary, but it ultimately bears the same kind of issues in delivery.

In a few moments, you will have an experience that will seem completely real. It will be the result of your subconscious fears transformed into your conscious awareness.

Brainstorm (1983) (SPOILERS) Might Brainstorm have been the next big thing – a ground-breaking, game-changing cinematic spectacle that had as far reaching consequences as Star Wars (special effects) or Avatar (3D) – if only Douglas Trumbull had been allowed to persevere with his patented “Showscan” process (70mm film photographed and projected at 60 frames per second)? I suspect not; one only has to look at the not-so-far-removed experiment of Ang Lee with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , and how that went down like a bag of cold sick, to doubt that any innovation will necessarily catch on (although Trumbull at least had a narrative hinge on which to turn his “more real than real” imagery, whereas Lee’s pretty much boiled down to “because it was there”). Brainstorm ’s story is, though, like its title, possibly too cerebral, too much concerned with the consciousness and touting too little of the cloyingly affirmative that Bruce Rubin inevitably brings to his screenplays. T

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.

Bugsy (1991) (SPOILERS) Bugsy is very much a Warren Beatty vanity project (aren’t they all, even the ones that don’t seem that way on the surface?), to the extent of his playing a title character a decade and a half younger than him. As such, it makes sense that producer Warren’s choice of director wouldn’t be inclined to overshadow star Warren, but the effect is to end up with a movie that, for all its considerable merits (including a script from James Toback chock full of incident), never really feels quite focussed, that it’s destined to lead anywhere, even if we know where it’s going.

No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

The Matrix (1999) (SPOILERS) Twenty years on, and the articles are on the defining nature of The Matrix are piling up, most of them touching on how its world has become a reality, or maybe always was one. At the time, its premise was engaging enough, but it was the sum total of the package that cast a spell – the bullet time, the fashions, the soundtrack, the comic book-as-live-action framing and styling – not to mention it being probably the first movie to embrace and reflect the burgeoning Internet ( Hackers doesn’t really count), and subsequently to really ride the crest of the DVD boom wave. And now? Now it’s still really, really good.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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