Film Review - Magic In The Moonlight (2014)

Genre: Comedy, Romance
Distributor: 19th September 2014 (UK)
Rating: 15
Running Time:97 Minutes
Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Emma Stone, Colin Firth, Marcia Gay Harden, Jacki Weaver, Hamish Linklater

After the sensational Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's latest feature sees him returning to the sort of nostalgic, charming and ever-so-slight fare that he seems to adore making. Taking us back to the 1920s, Magic in the Moonlight is a tale packed with a sumptuous visual aesthetic and absorbing performances - but little real substance.

Allen's latest settles in a wealthy estate in the South of France where Stanley (Colin Firth) an English illusionist goes undercover to unmask Sophie (Emma Stone), a suspected American swindler who claims to be clairvoyant. However, personal feelings get in the way of this dynamic and Stanley finds his judgement becoming cloudy as he falls for the young American.

Opening with a sprightly Cole Porter number, Allen starts as he means to go on by crafting the light and breezy, ever-charming tone that we have come to expect from his period features. This welcoming atmosphere is also bolstered by the appearance of Firth's Stanley, a man touring the country posing as Chinese conjurer Wei Ling Soo - when we first see him out of costume, Firth delights, arriving like a steam-train of dry sarcasm and snappy wit.

Upon shifting the narrative to Stanley's travels in France, Allen and cinematographer Darius Khondji pack the tale with a fairytale like aesthetic beauty - from the greenery of the rich country estates to the dazzling pastel colours of the cliffsides and seas. Combined with dazzling period costumes from Sonia Grande, Magic in the Moonlight is a visual feast that fully transports us back to a more appealing, carefree world of 1920s characters and whimsy.

Emma Stone brings a welcome sparkiness to the fold, with Allen's sharp dialogue flowing effortlessly from the wide-eyed, energetic actresses' tongue. There is an initial likeable simplicity to Sophie, yet it is always clear that there is slightly more depth to her occasionally suspect motivations. Paired with a savvy, sharp turn from Firth, Magic in the Moonlight should work effortlessly - and undeniably there is an amusing battle of personalities between the pair, however, this is squandered by a misjudged romantic turn in the narrative.

Whilst there is a watchable chemistry between the pair, this is not a convincing romantic chemistry - with the relationship never feeling particularly authentic (perhaps this is Allen's intention?). This is most likely due to the blatant age-gap between the pair and the fact we never quite believe that Firth's Stanley is head over heels for the near-thirty years junior Sophie. Given that this takes up such a vast part of Allen's narrative, this romantic angle brings a severe dip in quality.

Saving graces are provided by the delightful aesthetic, breezy humour and occasional sparks of dry brilliance in the dialogue. There are welcome supporting turns by the ever brilliant Eileen Atkins and Simon McBurney, and likeable appearances from Jacki Weaver and Marcia Gay Harden. However, unlike the magnificent Blue Jasmine, there is never anything particularly substantial (like Cate Blanchett's performance) for us as viewers to hold onto and be engrossed by.

Magic in the Moonlight is light, carefree and whimsically charming. With sumptuous visuals and period details, but little real substance, this is Allen at his most frustratingly pleasant and mediocre.

★★★
Andrew McArthur

Abig thanks to Andrew for letting us use his Culture Fix review

Review - Parkland

Stars: Zac Efron, Billy Bob Thornton, Paul Giamatti, Tom Welling, Marcia Gay Harden
Director: Peter Landesman
Release: 22nd of November 2013
Rating:  15 (UK)

Fifty years to the day that US President John F. Kennedy was shot, cinematic recreation of these events, Parkland, hits UK cinemas. There are little words to describe Peter Landesman's film other than a vapid, tasteless attraction that is neither compelling or insightful.

This ensemble piece follows the lives of several people who were dragged into the chaotic events spurred on by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Among those that Parkland follows are a young doctor (Zac Efron), a local man who catches the assassination on film - Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), and Robert Oswald (James Badge Dale), the brother of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

Shot in a manner that is so bitty and frantic, viewers are unlikely to be compelled or emotionally connect with any of the stories in Parkland. Characters and rushed on-and-off the screen like show ponies with far too much going on to grasp any cohesive human element of the story. The talented cast is squandered on undefined roles, characters presented with little to depth that exceeds the surface-level value of their costumes.  Despite the fast-paced chaos unfolding on screen, Landesman's film is remarkably dull and unfocused with a runtime that feels double its stated ninety minutes.

Parkand also feels like a rather tasteless affair, packed with unintentional laughs and toe-curling moments of crass details. Among these are Zac Efron's young doc pounding on Kennedy's bloody chest and yelling "No! Leave them on," when a nurse attempts to remove his boxers (a misguided attempt to give the President some dignity, which Landesman and co. had long since destroyed). There is also a blood-drenched Jackie Kennedy clutching a piece of 35th President's brain-matter, and Jackie Weaver's camped-up comic-relief Mrs. Oswald barking in her Southern drawl that her kill-ah son is an und-a-cova spy.   There are plenty of occasions when you may question if John Waters and Divine could even have produced a picture of such bad taste.

Why was a film like Parkland was needed? The events of Kennedy's assassination are heavily-documented in documentary and feature-film form. Not to mention the thousands of magazine articles and online features that have appeared and fed into the assassination and its myths. This is not going to prove insightful to the casual viewer, the history buff, or the conspiracy theorist.

Parkland squanders its impressive cast in this unfocused, tasteless, and boring recreation. With little depth and insight, Parkland can only be described as a mess.

★½☆☆☆

Andrew McArthur

Detachment DVD Review

Rarely does a film attack nuanced and complex institutions like America’s educatory system with such brazen, cursory detail and still get away with it. But with justified vitriol, attitude and a certain amount of first-hand authority, director Tony Kaye together with former public school teacher-now-writer Carl Lund find the right kind of brittle, agitated tone to carry through their sweeping messages and moral outrage.

Kaye, whose last widely-released work was the 2006 abortion documentary Lake of Fire, presents his argument this time around not merely through a convincing display of facts. Detachment instead stabs at an ill-defined place somewhere between case study and crucible, mashing up complementary elements of (presumably) first hand accounts, stories heard through the grapevine, and highly sensationalised fictions in order to create a scatterbrained launching pad for discussion, interrogation and reflection.

This obtuse handling of artifice is immediately realised from the opening, as slices of talking-head interviews with real teachers, mostly focusing on those who fell into the profession as opposed to worked towards it, are intercut with the fictional interjections of Adrien Brody, who may or may not be in character as English substitute teacher Henry Barthes (a possible nod to French social theorist Roland Barthes?). Both an affront to the fourth-wall and harbouring little narrative connectivity to the rest of the plot — other than to get the analytical ball rolling: why do we teach? — it’s the first highfalutin tic in a film full of stylised asides and visual experimentations: hand-drawn chalkboard animations, flashy montage cuts and hallucinatory flashbacks filmed in Super 8 weave in and out of Henry’s reality, mirroring the fractured and volatile state of his existence.

A belaboured point is made that his profession as a substitute teacher is in fact a manifestation of the emotional conflict that defines him, with his innate desire to educate and heal being sullied by an unwillingness to form any meaningful long-term connections — something which is eventually challenged by a chance meeting with an underage prostitute (Sami Gayle), who inadvertently talks Henry into a surrogate father/daughter relationship. Lund also attempts, through Camus-quoting epigraph, to position Henry as a character cursed with inconsolable pain and boundless empathy, and consequently he drifts throughout the film like a lost messiah.

Charting a three week teaching assignment at a bottom-of-the-barrel public school in Queens, home to the district’s ineducable cast-offs, Detachment pits Henry against a hellish gauntlet of violent students, inattentive classrooms, suicidal outcasts, and hilariously unhinged co-workers, each demanding of a particular subset of Henry’s skills (of which he doles out with almost superhuman patience). Though when the working day is done, his personal life is revealed to be just as strenuous, with episodic visits to an ailing grandfather becoming a major source of backstory for his embattled psychology.

Henry Barthes is a testament to the high-strung duties of the profession; his perpetually sorrowful brow is but a small sign of the overwhelming tax on humanity for which the daily grind demands. Brody, as always, plays the part with a physical vulnerability and personable softness. When battling profanity-spitting bullies with charismatic cool in his disobedient classroom, it’s easy to see why students such as the lonely Meredith (Betty Kaye) would find him so appealing.

The curiously one-dimensional, worst-case-scenario depiction of the school, however, as well as the constant threat of violence, death and suicide bubbling away in the undercurrent, smacks of dramatic exaggeration, and it will undoubtedly be up to the viewer to decide whether Kaye errs too much on the side of hyperbole to get his point across. However, in a world where the life and death consequences of abused and neglected teenagers are all-too-often, tragically literal, Kaye’s uncompromising approach feels all the more due.

Not simply relegated to the issues that arise within classroom walls, Detachment also takes more general shots at generational malaise, parental failings, bureaucracy, bullying and the grand notion of what it means to advance as a human species, often leaving many more troubling questions than answers in its wake. Culpability and responsibility are tantamount concerns, and neither writer nor director is shy to place blame on profit-driven advisory boards, or the occasional buck-passing parent; one memorable sequence involving a fruitless Parent-Teacher Night sees exactly zero parental attendees throughout the whole school, which seems like a comically unrealistic exaggeration, even for this film. But whether you lament its sometimes reductive nature, it’s hard to fault the anger from which it stems, nor the sheer ambition upon which it’s built.

Though many may take issue with the way Kaye strikes viscerally and unrelentingly — his vision of a filth-ridden, after hours Brooklyn may bring to mind Travis Bickle’s repulsive vision of ‘70s Manhattan, and you start to wonder if Henry will, too, wish for a Biblical flood to wash it all away — Detachment feels like the result of years of righteous, pent-up anguish, spilling from the gut.


—Pierre Badiola

★★★½☆

Rating: 15
DVD/BD Release Date: 21 January 2013 (UK)
Director: Tony Kaye
Writer: Carl Lund
Cast: Adrien Brody, Sami Gayle, Christina Hendricks, Marcia Gay Harden, James Caan, Lucy Liu

Buy Deteachment: DVD/ Blu-ray