Magic In the Moonlight (2014)

MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT  (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Woody Allen
    Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Simon McBurney,
    Eileen Atkins, Marcia Gay Harden,
    Hamish Linklater, Catherine McCormack
There's a documentary about Woody Allen in which Woody sits on a bed, flipping through some scraps of paper. Each piece of paper contains an idea for a movie, sketched out in a couple of sentences, more ideas for more movies than Allen will (presumably) ever get around to filming. As I was watching "Magic In the Moonlight", it occurred to me that the idea for this movie might've come from one of those scraps of paper. It's about a famous magician (Colin Firth) who travels to the South of France in 1928 to investigate a young medium (Emma Stone) and expose her as a fraud. That sets up a tug of war between logic and magic, as well as the usual Woody Allen reflections on life, death, art, God and the universe, and of course the magician and the medium become attracted to each other, and of course he's older than she is by 20 or 30 years. There's hardly a sympathetic character in the film, though Stone looks so cute in her flapper-era frocks and hats that in her case you don't really care. Marcia Gay Harden is underused as the medium's  mother, and Firth is simply insufferable, making you wonder how the supposedly clairvoyant Stone could fail to detect that he's an asshole, besides being way too fucking old. The white-on-black titles, period music and intellectual posturing are all clues it's a Woody Allen movie, but it's a minor work, one of his prettiest pictures, but one of his weakest scripts.