Film Review: Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

It's unfortunate that the plot of Magic in the Moonlight, the latest film from Woody Allen, has the slapdash, I-must-make-a-film-every-year-so-to-hell-with-second-drafts quality that has come to typify some of his recent works. This is not necessarily because the film is bad - it's a perfectly diverting and delicate trifle that gets by on gorgeous scenery and a handful of insanely charismatic actors - but because its effervescent surface hides one of Allen's most intellectually curious films in years, one that addresses death, religion and the afterlife in a way that suggests that these ideas are preying on Allen's mind more and more as he inches closer to his 80th birthday.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 56 - Separating Art from the Artist

Inspired in part by Gary Oldman's controversial interview in Playboy, this week finds Joe and I talking about artists whose work we respect or even love, even though they may have committed crimes or hold views that we disagree with on moral or political grounds. It's a touch more serious than our usual subject matter, but we still somehow found time to wonder whether or not Rolf Harris is more similar to Caravaggio than most people give him credit for.

As always, you can stream the podcast using the link below, or preferably (from our point of view) you can subscribe using iTunes. If you choose the later, please rate it and leave a review because it helps us to get more listeners, and also gives us something to obsess over. Speaking of which, you can also Like us on Facebook, assuming that you do.

Film Review: Scoop (2006)

Having decamped to London for Match Point and seemingly revitalised his creative juices, Woody Allen could easily have decided to mine the same somber thriller territory for all that it was worth. Ever driven by his distracted, digressive muse, he instead returned to doing exactly the same kind of strained comedy that he'd struggled with since 2000, the only noticeable difference being that the actors and accents had changed.

Film Review: Blue Jasmine (2013)

During his creative peak in the 1980s, one of Woody Allen's greatest strengths was his ability to write complex and captivating female characters. It helped that most of them were played by the incomparable Mia Farrow, and their creative partnership produced some of the best work either has ever done; he wrote great characters and she brought them to sparkling life. After their relationship ended in 1992, Allen still seemed capable of writing great roles for actresses, but they became less varied, falling into a handful of archetypes that could be enlivened by great performances - such as a never better Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite - but they were also flatter and less alive than many of his best. His latest, Blue Jasmine, marks a startling reversal of the trend, offering one of his most complicated characters and one of the best performances of Cate Blanchett's career.

Film Review: Match Point (2005)

After a five year run of comedies which were received indifferently by both critics and audiences, and more often than not deserving that reception, Woody Allen returned to favour in a pretty big way with Match Point, which not only became his most successful film for the better part of two decades, but received rave reviews and landed Allen an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, his first since 1998. It's not hard to see why it garnered so much attention since it represented such major departure for him; it was his first primarily dramatic film in years, the first film he had shot entirely outside of the United States since Love and Death and his first thriller, although it doesn't initially appear to be one.

Film Review: Anything Else (2003)

By the time that Anything Else was released in 2003, Woody Allen was in something of a rut. His previous three films saw him following a very similar pattern, making film after film after film in which he starred as a hapless, down on his luck guy who gets caught up in a caper beyond his control, with each film feeling a little more tired and strained than the last. While Anything Else didn't exactly set the world alight ten years ago - it received much the same mixed response that his other contemporary films had - in retrospect it looks like a much more interesting picture, if only because it marked a clear change from the kind of films he had been making. It might not have done much to reverse the consensus opinion that he was in a slump, but it does mark the point at which he seemed to start pushing himself again.

Film Review: Hollywood Ending (2002)

In Hollywood Ending, Woody Allen plays Val Waxman, a director who develops psychosomatic blindness. He does so as a result of the stress of working on a film which could be his big comeback or completely destroy his career. With the help of his agent (Mark Rydell), he tries to maintain the illusion that he can see, and sets about making the film despite at no point being able to tell what is going on or whether the dailies actually look any good. However, the reaction of his producer/ex-wife Ellie (Téa Leoni) and the growing tension between Waxman and everyone else on set clues the audience in that film is going to be an utter fiasco. Unfortunately, we never get to see the finished product, which is a terrible shame because, while it might have been terrible, I felt like I would rather have watched Val Waxman's The City That Never Sleeps because it would have at least been interesting, whereas Hollywood Ending was not.

Film Review: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

Though his work in the '90s was not as consistently great as in the '70s and '80s, it was one of the most interesting periods of Woody Allen's career. Whether as a reaction to the tabloid furore that followed his very public and acrimonious split from Mia Farrow or as a natural extension of his evolution as an artist, a harsh darkness began to creep into his films. This reached its peak with his last three films of the decade, which ran the gamut from bittersweet (Sweet and Lowdown) to just plain bitter (Celebrity and Deconstructing Harry). It was a triptych which contains some of his most bracing and uncompromising work, for better or worse, but marked him as someone who still has a lot to say.

Film Review: Bananas (1971)

"Hey, you ever think about bein' an ant?"

On the DVD commentary for The Simpsons episode "Two Bad Neighbours", in which former President George H.W. Bush moves onto Evergreen Terrace and becomes the Mr. Wilson to Bart Simpson's Dennis the Menace, the executive producer for the episode, Josh Weinstein, mentions that one of the cast members (unnamed by Weinstein, though I've always assumed it was Harry Shearer) described the script as "some of the worst satire" he had ever read. Weinstein defended the episode by saying the point wasn't to criticise Bush's policies or his time as President, but to make fun of him personally, as a sort of continuation of the show's long-running feud with the Bush family. "Two Bad Neighbours" wasn't intended as satire, but a goofy little story.

Film Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

When it was released in 2008, Vicky Cristina Barcelona was roundly hailed as one of Woody Allen's periodic returns to form. Having seemingly exhausted London as a subject/setting, he turned his restless eye to Barcelona, and used it as a setting for a story of love and the many forms that it can take. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scralett Johansson) are a pair of Americans who visit Barcelona together, though they do so for different reasons.

Film Review: To Rome With Love (2012)

Though the films Woody Allen has made since decamping from his New York stomping ground have varied in terms of story, tone and style, one of the main consistencies has been that each new city he has visited on his European Vacation has invigorated the resulting work. This is particularly noticeable with his latest film, To Rome With Love, since, whilst it bears a number of similarities to his pretty woeful London-set 2010 film You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger - both are films set in a major European city, both are ensemble comedies, and both consist of disparate stories connected almost solely by location - the former film is actually a lot of fun, whilst the latter was a terrible chore. There's a vivaciousness to the film that suggests that Allen enjoys exploring a great city on screen almost as much as he does telling a story set in that city, and that sense of discovery then infuses the story itself with new life. The quality of his trips to Paris and  Rome suggest that a change of scenery does the veteran director a world of good, so long as he doesn't hang around for too long.

Oscar Predictions: The Major Awards

Welcome back. Having completely, thoroughly and no doubt inaccurately predicted the Technical Awards yesterday, today I'll round off the awards season by trying to decide which films will take home the Oscars that everyone actually cares about.

Ed's Top 20 Films of 2011

They sure are happy to have the Number One spot.

First off, I'd just like to wish everyone reading this a Happy New Year. I hope that you all had a great couple of days and are quietly dreading the return to the normal grind of working life as much as I am. (If you work in a capacity that meant that you have not had any time off over the last few weeks, my heart goes out to you. I worked over Christmas and New Year the last few years and it is the worst.) I saw the New Year in by getting ferociously drunk in a cottage just outside of Blackpool with a bunch of my friends, and it was terrific.

Film Review: Midnight In Paris (2011)

The most important thing that needs to be said about Midnight In Paris, the latest film from Woody Allen, is that not only is it a very good film, but that it is a very good film outside of the context of its creator's work. For much of the last decade critics have described some of Allen's films as good or as returns to form, but what they really mean is, "Well, it's better than the last thing he did." Considering that the last thing Allen directed was the lazy and half-baked You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, the bar was admittedly set pretty low, but Midnight In Paris is not just better than the last film he made, it's easily the best film he has made since Sweet and Lowdown in 1999.

Film Review: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Let history show that this was officially the point at which Woody Allen just stopped trying.

Woody Allen has directed at least one film a year since 1982, and his decision to keep up that work rate well into his 70s is, on one level, incredibly admirable. However, whenever he produces a film as lazy, ill-conceived and tired as You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, it's hard not to think that, much like Alfie Shebritch (Anthony Hopkins), he might be better off accepting that he isn't as young as he used to be and that adopting a more sedate pace, or at least taking an extra few months to come up with an ending to his script, might be a better idea.

Celebrity (1998)

I got the 3 esses: self-indulgent, sophomoric, sollipsistic...


Kenneth Branagh and Judy Davis star in Woody Allen's film about the divergent paths that a couples' lives take after their divorce, with Branagh's failed novelist and aspiring screenwriter becoming a prospective starfucker who is as obsessed with the allure and power of the celebrities he interviews as he is repulsed by the empty, vacuous nature of celebrity, and Davis' school teacher a nervous wreck who falls in love with a TV producer (Joe Mantegna). As the story progresses, the two go on very different journeys as Branagh falls into a series of relationships with very attractive, very young women (including Famke Janssen and Winona Ryder) that he, in one way or another, fucks up, and Davis finds love and a new career.

Whatever Works

I'm not a likable guy.


Boris Yellnikoff has a rather dim view of humanity. He views all human endeavour as worthless, all affection as meaningless, and everyone he meets is either a cretin, a moron or a zombie. He's no prize himself. Despite being, in his own words, a profound and sensitive soul with an enormous grasp of the human condition, Boris is a hypochondriac who has to sing 'Happy Birthday' twice when he washes his hands to keep the germs away, and mistakes mosquito bites for melanoma and indigestion for thyroid cancer.

After a late-night epiphany in which he realises that he is dying, not now, but eventually, Boris unsuccessfully attempts suicide. After he gets out of the hospital he divorces his wife, gives up his position as a professor teaching string theory at Columbia, and spends his days ranting at anyone who'll listen. His friends, the children he teaches chess to part-time, even the audience watching are harangued about their existence as Boris expounds his philosophy about life, the universe and everything.

Enter: Melody, (Evan Rachel Wood) an impressionable girl from Mississippi. With her mix of naivety and broad Southern accent, she's like something out of a William Faulkner novel. Melody ran away from home because of her ability for fooling around with the boy who caught the biggest catfish in town, and winds up on Boris' doorstep asking for food. Boris begrudgingly lets her into his apartment for one night, but quickly realises that she is not going to be all that easy to get rid of, and he may not even want to get rid of her.

Originally intended as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, and which was shelved following his death in 1977, Whatever Works is probably Woody Allen's funniest film in the better part of a decade. With Larry David as a near-perfect Allen substitute, the film delights in his acerbic diatribes about the stupidity of humanity. In his view, people who call their mothers 'Mom' should be executed, and children should spend two weeks every summer in a concentration camp to really get a sense of what the human race are like. It's a gleefully misanthropic view of the world that makes perfect use of Larry David's particular brand of passive-aggressive hectoring.

Larry David is terrific at delivering the film's long, breathless monologues, and his back and forths with Evan Rachel Wood are frequently hilarious. There's a real chemistry to their culture-clash conversations, whether he is dismissing her views on religion or she says that he was nominated for a Nobel Prize for Best Picture, and this chemistry makes their relationship make much more sense on screen than it should, since on paper it sounds quite mean. If David wasn't wryly amused by this creature that has wandered into his life, and if Wood wasn't so sweetly naive, then the film could have been a rather bitter piece in which an old man insulted a young girl for 90 minutes.

Beyond its first half, Whatever Works introduces several secondary characters that take the focus away from the central relationship, to the film's detriment. Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr. show up as Melody's God-fearing parents, and whilst they are both incredibly funny when they are with David and Wood, and even on their own, (Begley, Jr. gets the funniest scene in the film when he talk to a gay man in a bar) the move away from the tight, focused first 45 minutes does slow things down markedly.

It also doesn't help that the last half sees the more emotional side of the story comes in to play and reveals the limitations of the leads. As good as he is at capturing the caustic wit of Allen's script, Larry David is just too blunt to give Boris any of the vulnerability that Allen's best characters have. His neuroses seem affected and the wary, sarcastic Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm never disappears, so when he has to express any genuine sentiment it rings false. Not that there aren't moments of real poignancy, such as a beautiful speech Boris gives about the miraculous, random nature of the universe bringing him and Melody together, just that David rarely hits the dramatic notes that the film needs him to. Similarly, the second half sees Melody going off on her own without Boris, and the character winds up feeling lost without her sparring partner. The film needs that chalk-and-cheese dynamic to work, and on her own Melody is pure cheese.

Whatever Works could be accused of being elitist - its central premise seems to suggest that all that's needed to fix the gaping divisions in America is for the hicks to move to New York, take up photography and get involved in an hilariously benign ménage à trois - but there's a genuinely uplifting message at its heart. Boris' acceptance of the meaningless of existence gives rise to his theory of 'Whatever Works': whatever makes you happy, do it, because it ultimately doesn't matter. It's a philosophy that pulls the film through its contrived final act, and allows it to end on a note of grace that delivers sentiment without sentimentality. It's the sort of ending that even Boris Yellnikoff couldn't completely hate.