{"id":13285,"date":"2014-07-29T07:43:48","date_gmt":"2014-07-29T14:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=13285"},"modified":"2014-07-29T07:44:32","modified_gmt":"2014-07-29T14:44:32","slug":"magic-in-the-moonlight-film-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/magic-in-the-moonlight-film-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic in the Moonlight — Film Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Magic in the Moonlight<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Directed by Woody Allen<\/p>\n

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I spent most of this movie wondering why it was made.\u00a0\u00a0 It is not a movie about characters and plot and story line so much as it is a movie about contentious grappling with big philosophical issues.\u00a0 Does God exist?\u00a0 Is there an afterlife?\u00a0 Is there a “spiritual” realm apart from the world we see and experience, and do some people have special access to it?\u00a0 How much faith should we put in science and rationality?\u00a0 Do we need our illusions to maintain our humanity?\u00a0 A rather esoteric constellation of topics for a mainstream movie.\u00a0 The characters are rather simplified and cartoonish.\u00a0 The plot is contrived and manipulative.\u00a0 Yet the film is so well made, so well acted, and there are enough surprises that you are prevented from being bored to death with these tiresome philosophical arguments.<\/p>\n

Woody Allen seems to like Europe, the 1920s, Dixieland jazz, and the well off and educated.\u00a0 There are allusions to books and writers like Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Dickens, Freud, etc.\u00a0 You have to have gone to college and studied liberal arts to watch this movie.\u00a0 The characters have some intriguing qualities, but he is not interested enough in them to develop them or their relationships in any depth or complexity.\u00a0\u00a0 The girl, Sophie, (Emma Stone) is beautiful, but he seems hostile toward her.\u00a0 She starts out attractive and appealing, but then morphs into a deceitful, conniving, low class, criminal.\u00a0 He can’t seem to make up his mind whether to let a romance develop between her and Stanley (Colin Firth).\u00a0 Finally, with her exposure as a fraud, the romance angle is repudiated once and for all, but then turns around yet again as the curtain is coming down in a very unconvincing reappearance for a happy ever after ending with Stanley.\u00a0 It reflects the confused, indecisive character of this whole film.\u00a0 There is some humor that works.\u00a0 It works to some extent on the level of light entertainment, but the simplified, distorted characters lack the substance to give weight to the serious issues that the film wants to be preoccupied with.\u00a0 I just didn’t get the “message” that this film was trying to get across, but it did seem to be trying to get some kind of a message out.\u00a0 Some people in the theater applauded at the end, but not me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Magic in the Moonlight Directed by Woody Allen I spent most of this movie wondering why it was made.\u00a0\u00a0 It is not a movie about characters and plot and story…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13285","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"