Overheard at the Movies: Magic in the Moonlight, The Insider, Planes: Fire & Rescue, Mood Indigo

Here are clips from a few intriguing things I've overheard at the movies this week, regarding Woody Allen's new movie; my favorite Michael Mann film; Disney's latest talking-vehicle adventure; and the latest fantasy from Eternal Sunshine's Michel Gondry...

1.

Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere on Woody Allen's upcoming film Magic in the Moonlight:

Magic in the MoonlightincidentalBob DylanMagicthe first Woody flick that includes a sincerely written and performed scene in which the lead tries to pray

Allen’s proximity to…well, not death but a stage of life in which death tends to tap people on the shoulder more often than not has led him to make the first spiritual-quest film of his life. It’s certainly not a typical romantic chess-play movie, I can tell you that.

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2.

Scout Tafoya at RogerEbert.com on the 15th anniversary of one of my favorite films — Michael Mann's The Insider:

Mann’s meticulous directorial style applied to such a carefully constructed screenplay resulted in one of his finest films. "The Insider" may seem like an anomaly in Mann’s filmography, riddled with thieves, gunmen and cops on the brink, but they all share a Hawksian sense of men staring down convention and overwhelming odds.

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Planes: Fire and Rescue, reviewed by Susan Wloszczyna at RogerEbert.com:

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Don’t get me wrong. "Planes: Fire & Rescue" won’t ever be mistaken for a classic, especially not with its happy ending that exists primarily for the benefit of future sequels. But it has to be healthier and more edifying for a child eight and under to watch this rather than a "Transformers" movie. Besides, any film with the insight to hire the married comedy team Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara as an elderly anniversary couple named Harvey and Winnie—yes, they are RVs—at least has some creative juice in its tank.

But Steven Greydanus at The National Catholic Register says:

But when Planes: Fire & Rescue comes down to evacuating mostly anonymous campers — and by campers, of course, I mean RVs and other vehicles — the dramatic limitations of the world of Cars become all too apparent. At the end of the day, stretch and squash how the animators will, there is only so much you can do with anthropomorphic vehicles. A long line of vehicles slowly evacuating a campground may be many things, but thrilling it isn’t.

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Mood Indigo, reviewed by Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com:

The movie is adapted and directed by from the 1946 novel "Lecume des Jours" ("The Froth of Days") by Boris Vian, a source that has been described as a class-consciousness parable about rich people living in a Garden of Eden built from their money and then gradually being forced out of it.

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The film's English-language title comes from a piece by Duke Ellington, who was godfather to Vian’s daughter, Carole. The whole story strives for the light, sweet but ultimately melancholy tone of Ellington's piece, but that tone at odds with the satire, which is unfocused to start with, and which very quickly gets smothered by the moon-sized marshmallow of Gondry's Gallic cuteness. The movie wants to tickle your fancy and break your heart, but mostly it just wears you out.