MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

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Prolific But Redundant
Woody’s Same Old Song and Dance

Woody Allen has mastered the art of making the same trivial film over and over again. His “Blue Jasmine”-experiment was an exception that resulted in an utter failure of tone. Part of the problem was Cate Blanchett’s powerhouse performance, which outshined the undeserving script beneath her.

For “Magic in the Moonlight,” Allen once again features a scenic foreign location (the French Riviera in this case) where an older man falls for and woos a younger woman. The man is Colin Firth’s ‘20s-era stage magician and hoax-exposer Stanley Crawford (aka Wei Ling-soo). Stanley’s Asian stage persona is a Fu Manchu-styled illusionist who cuts women in half and transports his body across the stage unseen.

Stanley’s old friend and less talented fellow magician Howard (Simon McBurney) visits him backstage after a successful performance. Howard asks Stanley to accompany him to the south of France to expose the fraud of a young female psychic named Sophie (Emma Stone) who travels with her business agent mother (Marcia Gay Harden).

Sophie has cast her hex over a wealthy family from Pittsburgh now living in France. Sophie serves as the family's psychic-in-residence. She holds séances complete with mysterious knocks and floating candles. Stanley arrives under the pseudonym Taplinger to engage in taking the fake psychic's inventory and exposing her deceit. Despite his earnest but snotty attempts to crack Sophie’s deceptions, Stanley falls for her young feminine charms and clairvoyant powers — hook, line, and sinker.

Allen coasts through the breezy storyline with frequent detours to familiar territories. A sudden downpour traps Stanley and Sophie inside an observatory where they bond romantically. Never mind that the lovestruck and wealthy Brice (Hamish Linklater) is looking to marry Sophie. Brice can’t stop singing songs to her on his ukulele.

There are a few laugh-inducing bits that pop in Allen’s nostalgia-filled romance fantasy, but not enough to say that the movie works as a comedy, much less as a farce of any weight. Just as with other late-period Woody Allen films (think "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," "Match Point," or "Scoop"), “Magic in the Moonlight” is a cinematic amuse-bouche. It’s satisfying if you’re not yet tired of Woody Allen’s rubber-stamped comedies.

Allen’s knack for dialogue is still alive, but there is no freshness to his work. Social commentary is absent. Allen goes through the motions of reconfiguring his pet storyline into something new yet redundant. It's a fine style of cinema for older audiences, but not so exciting to modern moviegoers. If, however, you've stuck with Woody Allen over the years since his impressive debut films in the '70s, you'll be sorely disappointed. It's been a long time since "Husbands and Wives" (1992), Allen's last great movie.

Allen has evidently chosen to spend his final days making easy — read lazy — movies to pay the bills. Woody Allen’s low-impact cinema allows for enticing performances from Emma Stone and Colin Firth even if their characters’ arcs are so minimal as to be entirely neglected. Nevertheless, the Riviera’s celebrated sunlight makes you feel like you’re on a mini-vacation. There isn’t much magic left in Woody’s moon, but the sun in the south of France has the final say.

Rated PG-13. 97 mins.

WINTER'S TALE

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Cosmic Crush
Collin Farrell’s Starry-Eyed Burden Goes Cold

It’s a testament to Colin Farrell’s ineffable appeal as an actor that his warm-hearted performance keeps the audience awake during producer/screenwriter-turned-director Akiva Goldsman’s otherwise somnolent adaptation of Mark Helprin’s romantic fantasy set in New York.

Farrell plays Peter Lake, abandoned as an infant by his rejected would-be immigrant parents to America in the early 20th century and now an adult. To his irresponsible and/or desperate parents, placing the baby Peter in a stolen model sailboat and setting it adrift in the Atlantic seems like the right thing to do in light of their dire circumstances. Bizarre, I know. Cut to a grown-up Peter working as a mechanic and cat burglar preying on the proto-1%ers along Manhattan’s Central Park West.

Somewhere along the way Peter has earned the enmity of Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe), a demonic criminal kingpin intent on crushing him like a bug with the help of his gang of dapper thugs.

There is a guilty pleasure in comparing Crowe’s overbearing performance to that of Colin Farrell — an actor who represents the antithesis of everything the temper-tantrum-wallowing Russell Crowe represents. The good versus evil analogy couldn’t be more apropos. The problem is that Crowe and Farrell don’t share enough scenes together to savor their diametric differences and create tension.

Weirdness alert! The hotheaded Pearly answers directly to Lucifer, yes, that one, the Lord of Darkness. In this case Satan is named in the credits as “Judge” (played for unintended camp laughs by a horribly miscast Will Smith). Smith’s mechanically altered voice booms with authoritative import as his dubious character hears out Pearly’s plea for permission to kill Peter because, it seems, our angel-protected thief has a talent for procuring precious stones that Pearly likes to hoard. At least the movie has a little comic relief to spark audience reaction whenever Will Smith pops up onscreen.

There’s some spiritually narrated gibberish about stars and light that adds up to zilch, but the film’s impotent tone of immortal love is all that matters to the filmmakers. The key champion of the fairy dust fantasy is a wing-sprouting white horse that rescues Peter just as Pearly and his henchmen are about to shoot him.

The nameless guardian horse (called “Athansor” in the novel) points Peter to a specific mansion for our scruffy thief to make his nut for the day. On the verge of cracking the house safe, Peter hears a piano played by the home’s terminally ill shut-in Beverly (Jessica Brown Findlay), a red-haired beauty. Beverly’s lithe body is riddled with consumption (a.k.a. tuberculosis). She sleeps in a tent on the roof to keep her overheated physique cool at night. Love at first sight devours the couple, and Peter attempts to keep Beverly alive with his overflowing show of affection.

Yet, just when it seems like the movie has something going for it in the romance department, a disorientating time shift sends the same-aged Peter into modern day New York where he searches for signs of his lost love.

Syrupy and bland, “Winter’s Tale” is tailor-made for bubble-headed 14-year-old girls to ooh and ahh over. It’s a heavy-handed piece of quirky melodrama told with broad strokes and plenty of artificiality. There’s just enough sensuality to pique the interest of said target audience, but nothing remotely moving for anyone that hasn’t yet shed their virginity. “Winter’s Tale” is a remedial romance movie complete with training-wheels. At least it has Colin Farrell as its doting instructor.

Rated PG-13. 118 mins.

LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE — CANNES 2012

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Losing to Japan
Kiarostami Falters

It’s easy to get swept up in the allure of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema of modulated emotional power. Kiarostami milks contextual layers of his characters’ mutable objectives out of long dramatic sequences that catch you off guard.

Nothing is taken for granted. Every surface directly supports each character’s inner and outer life. In one sequence, Kiarostami returns to his signature interior-automobile space as a semi-public-semi-private staging ground for an intimate socially inflected exchange of culturally divergent ideas.

The ex-patriot Iranian auteur of such gems as “Taste of Cherry” (1997) and “Certified Copy” (2010) has the beguiling ability to blend seamless exposition with subtle character revelations. Still, no filmmaker is above making errors of judgment. Kiarostami makes a big one here. A theatrically hamstrung narrative is abandoned by an ambiguous ending that leaves the audience feeling cheated rather than validated for sharing in the experience.

Set in modern day Tokyo, “Like Someone in Love” wants to be an indigenously Japanese social polemic about a young college-girl prostitute, her abusive loose-cannon boyfriend, and a mild retired college professor who hires the girl for a night — more out of loneliness than lust. The doddering old man has gone to the trouble of making a soup native to the region of Japan where the young prostitute is from. She doesn’t care. She didn't like the soup her grandmother made for her when she was a child. She just wants to sleep.

One axiom concerning minimalism states that a narrative subject needs to be richly, even over-informed, in order for the stripped-down skeletal structure to express the weight of an artist’s intended thematic implications. Picasso’s sketches are significant for what he purposefully left out. Bodies leap from the surface with expressive movement. “Like Someone in Love” weaves together thematic strands that it doesn’t bother to link thematically. No good.

To be fair, the film’s opening sequence is beautifully composed. Two girlfriends talk in a restaurant bar owned by their businessman pimp. The camera angle is low. The influence of Kiarostami’s auteur muse Yasujiro Ozu is firmly on display. Akiko (Rin Takanashi) — one of the film’s three interchangeable protagonists — doesn’t get a joke her friend tells her about two millipedes on their wedding night. Akiko is a naïve girl going wherever the world takes her.

Exposition seeps out. Like Japan itself, a land of cramped and crowded spaces, the social setting is excruciatingly public. “No phones in the toilets,” her boss informs Akiko when she attempts to take her cellphone conversation with her to the bathroom. She fights on the phone with a boyfriend who “only causes her pain.” Her concerned boss advises her to “end it with the boy.” Unlike an average stereotyped pimp, he cares about Akiko as a person, perhaps as much as a family member. The pimp-whore relationship has a father-daughter quality.

Akiko’s assignment for the night is to entertain Watanabe Takashi (well played by Tadashi Okuno), a famous author, translator, and retired college instructor. Night turns to day. Takashi drives Akiko to college where she has a test. From his parked car Takeshi watches Akiko’s boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase) accost her on the stairs. Soon, Noriaki is seated inside the elderly Takashi’s car asking the man he believes to be Akikio’s benevolent grandfather for permission to marry Akiko. Takashi advises against it. The unpredictable Noriaki remains contrite, but his flashpoint temper will return.

Third-act failure is not what you’d expect from Abbas Kiarostami. Unfortunately the literal window that shatters to announce the film’s climax arrives without a necessary crisis decision that would finally identify the story’s protagonist, and deliver the characters and audience to a catharsis worthy of the drama that has come before.

Not Rated. 109 mins.