NOTHING UP HIS SLEEVE: Movie review of Woody Allen’s film Magic in the Moonlight by Howard Casner

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Warning: SPOILERS

DSCF9550.RAFWoody Allen, almost a national treasure now as far as I’m concerned, has always been something of a clever parodist.

He can imitate anything, both seriously and satirically, from Bergman (Love & Death, Interiors and Husbands and Wives amongst a ton of others) to Fellini (Stardust Memories) to Kafka and Bertolt Brecht (Shadows and Fog) to documentaries (Take the Money and Run and Zelig) to almost anything else.

Now we have a new set of authors that Allen has mined for a movie. His latest foray into cinematic creativity, Magic in the Moonlight, a story about a magician trying to prove that a psychic is a fraud in the 1920’s south of France, is basically Noel Coward and Somerset Maughm with a lead character that is straight out of Shaw’s Pygmalion as if written by Nietzsche. Read the rest of this entry »