And my desire to see Magic in the Moonlight was mostly based on the fact it starred Emma Stone (and Colin Firth was a draw for Ma) and the fact it was set in the 1920's. I didn't even know that it was a Woody Allen movie until this morning.
I think Ma summed it up best when she said, right after the movie finished, "I think if it had been set in any other time period, I would have been bored".
Which isn't to say that Firth and Stone weren't great with what they were given. Firth is his usual slightly pompus, slightly stuffy persona... and Stone vacillates between the wide eyed ingenue and that slightly screwball comedy character she does really well.
But everyone seems to be either slightly over stylised in their performances or else they're given dialogue that doesn't sound natural.
I have a feeling the script is somewhat to blame... the story has more or less been done before and in much better ways... the character motivations, particularly Firth's major character shift midway through the movie, just seem to come out of nowhere at all, and Allen's attempts at screwball comedy dialogue and scenarios just seem to land flat on their faces.
One of the few shining lights is Eileen Atkins who could clearly play her character in her sleep, so naturally does it all come to her. And she's really the only one who doesn't seem to be trying to chew her way through the scenery.
I couldn't help continually comparing this to the 2009 movie, also starring Firth, Easy Virtue, and Moonlight definitely comes off second best.
yani's rating: 1 mental vibration out of 5
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