Reviews

I had to find excuses to leave the cinema. Get a popcorn, go to the bathroom, make a phone call. This movie had me so fidgety with boredom and aggravation that the director's arrogance to force audiences to sit through 2.5 hours of drivel is apparent so much on every scene in this movie.

Luca Guardadingno seems to want to be like other great directors, so he just borrows their look and their technique and throws a bunch of loosely connected ideas to the wall and hopes they stick. He brags a knowledge of cinema as if that will save his own messy undisciplined approach to storytelling.

There's a very real kind of pretentiousness permeating everything in this movie. None of it seems to be for the audience enjoyment. Confident filmmaking would be something, and there's plenty of that in most movies, but you get the sense that the surefire vision of most filmmakers is backed up by some kind of discipline and mastery and a respect for the audience experience. Crack the whip, bring the best out of the story, the crew, drive your compulsion to a near perfectionism and you end up with something great. That would have been great.

Because audiences tend to sense the passion within a project.

This is something else entirely. One imagines Guardadingo cracking a whip at his crew while playing on his iphone.

It's just a mess. A messy messy mess. A slow, painful mess. Expect to at least have some unintended laughs at the end. The ending is so so dumb, like a school play made by teenagers.

The funniest thing I've seen in awhile. The last 2o minutes of the movie I heard more laughs in the theatre than I do at any seth rogen "comedy." I give it a point for trying, but it's just trying very hard to seem smart, while leaving no substance until only the thing left to fight any breath for is the vapor of "you just dont understand art."

Kitsch.

*Before i go any further, I've seen 6 or 7 bad reviews get removed from here in the week or so beforehand. There's a lot more people out there who dont like this movie than is allowed to say it, apparently. Be wary of the campaigning.

A perfect 10? No way.

I'd like it more if it didnt seem so pretentious, self important (rather than telling us a story), and arrogant.. Why couldnt it be like any good art form and just actually in any kind of service to the audience's enjoyment? "Six acts and an epilogue?" For 2.5 hours? REally? Ok. I will take the ticket, but I'm expecting to be really moved and really absorbed in the journey. Forget it. This movie is like watching paint dry. I was invited on a six act, plus epilogue, 2.5 hour journey and then forced to watch a mess. Irritated, I'd have given it more points for effort if it hadnt seemed so lazy and arrogant.

Ok, 2.5 hours, very bold of you, so take me on that journey then, but in order to be that bold, indeed, it better be a masterpiece. A masterpiece has to be an actual master of form, master of storytelling, master of character direction, master of dealing with the team's talents, etc before you force others to watch whatever you dictate they should. This requires a level of meticulous detail and effort that goes far beyond ordinary thresholds. It requires much more care for the work that is being put into it and the people you invite to it. They dont have to like it, or want to go, you know. So you better care about them.

This movie is NOT Dr. Zhivago. It is not an "epic." Publicity like that is also why the word "genius" doesnt mean a hill of beans anymore. Lawrence of Arabia is an "epic," homies. This is just long. And it's long because it is lazy. Zhivago, Lawrence are epic weavings of tremendous character arcs.

This is faux and shallow passing itself off as value; it's like Slavoj Zizek on celluloid, and just as incomprehensible as his blabbery tongue. Russell Brand type "knowsomethingish" superficial nothingness.

It's wayyyy too lazy and self important to pull together a mastery of the creative team and medium. You get the sense of a tyrant yelling at the editor or the team: "NO- it's my movie and it has to have all those pointless things in it, because i said so. Put more stuff in it or you're fired!"

How is it mastery if it seems like no one was editing it? I'm sure there was someone saying we should edit more, but I cant help imagine it going like "no, it's perfect, i am genius. " :-D This suffers the same way a lot of Christopher Nolan's movies suffer from = a real lack of self editing or listening to what doesnt work.

ugh.

People putting this movie on a pedastal either aren't really expressing why it is even good. It seems like either they are paid to write good reviews for PR purposes, havent seen a lot of movies, or they just like something because it seems artsy fartsy. I'm the first to be thirsty for more independent cinema, less super hero stories, but this movie is not really helping us get there.

This movie has no plot points or unifying structure - these are elements of mastery in storytelling. Even most of David Lynch's movies have an inner logic that runs like a thread through all the quirkiness, maintains tone, and sticks to a language that piques interest in the characters. This movie just borrows from other directors.

Being able to direct and weave a story together requires an extraordinary amount of development and work, and this movie has no hint of that. i'm sure the writer had a good script at some time, but it seems like someone wanted to just throw anything and everything at it in hopes someone would like them. Cheesy 70s camera tricks and bad frame rate changes mix in strangely with bad cgi, poor costumes and "avant garde dance theory" choreograhy. It seems to want to make a point on feminism (spare us the politics please), be a horror movie, be an homage to other great filmmakers, and be an arty "epic" all in one. I do remember good cinema, and all of those movies knew what they wanted to be and say. Remember the nineties? Sigh...

Subplots wander as aimlessly as tilda Swinton in a fake looking man costume, and just like the conundrum of why she is even in that costume instead of a man, also these subplots never get resolved or have any clearer of an aim. How is that mastery?

I went home and binge watched some great movies just to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

*I wrote 2 reviews here because my first one didnt seem to be published.