|
Post by wilcinema on Sept 5, 2018 22:04:16 GMT
Ok, I HATED "The childhood of a leader", so I went into "Vox Lux" with my expectations down. I can't say I hated it, but it still failed to engage me. I'm quite confident this movie will have its fair share of fans here, but I found it a mess. PSTD, gun violence, show business, family affairs, all in the same movie, and almost all of them were never fully explored. It's almost like Corbet wanted to check out as many boxes as possible to show that he can be an ambitious filmmaker but he still seems very immature to me. Natalie Portman has a character that looks like an eerie and disturbing crossover between Nina Sayers and Riggan Thomson, but her performance lacks the fierce, feverish hubris/fragility of the former, and at the same time, the neurotic bottled lightning of the latter. It's a decent performance but it is so hyperbolically over the top that it almost turned me off. Jude Law was okay, although his character doesn't make that much sense in the movie.
At the end of the day, "Vox Lux" is a pastiche that will appeal to many and will turn as many off. A polarizing movie, they say nowadays.
|
|
|
Post by evilbliss on Nov 21, 2018 9:21:42 GMT
I saw it last night with Brady Corbet in attendance and I loved it!! The movie is absolutely non-Oscar friendly but Portman's performance deserves recognition. It'll be a shame if she doesn't get nominated for this, she was explosive and so charismatic. She always hits the right notes.
|
|
|
Post by stephen on Nov 21, 2018 18:52:18 GMT
so hyperbolically over the top that it almost turned me off
|
|
|
Post by Allenism on Nov 21, 2018 20:39:46 GMT
The first half is a lot stronger than the second half, which feels like it's not quite sure where to go after a certain point. Corbet juggles a lot of balls in his screenplay--probaly a few too many--but the confidence and stylistic panache with which he directs leaves an impact. I don't expect everyone to love Portman's dialed-to-11 performance (it's also a jarring bit of casting to have her play the older version of Cassidy), but it's the most fun she's been onscreen probaly ever.
|
|
|
Post by wilcinema on Nov 21, 2018 21:28:31 GMT
Honestly, I thought the younger Cassidy was soooo much better. Portman basically plays a 30-year-old teenager with all her tantrums and fits.
|
|
|
Post by stephen on Jan 26, 2019 22:27:48 GMT
If Cold War was La La Land by way of Tarkovsky, then Vox Lux is if Lars von Trier decided to make A Star Is Born. It is a film designed explicitly to provoke, to outrage, to be unapologetic about it all—but it nevertheless buckles beneath the heavy hand of its director and its outsized leading lady.
Split into three acts, each punctuated by an act of violence, Vox Lux is the tale of Celeste Montgomery, a musical ingenue whose breakthrough into stardom isn’t exactly Mouseketeer-esque. Celeste (played in the first half of the film by Raffey Cassidy) was a Staten Island middle-schooler who was shot in the neck during a Columbine-esque massacre, and who skyrocketed to sensation after performing a powerful song in lieu of a eulogy at a church vigil for her classmates. Celeste is immediately catapulted into the limelight, and in the course of the first act of the film goes from being a quietly religious innocent into a debauched, don’t-give-a-fuck celebrity.
The second act, propelled by a violent terrorist attack where the shooters wore outfits inspired by a Celeste music video, takes place on the eve of the musician’s “rebirth” tour. Now Celeste is played by Natalie Portman in a tsunami-like turn utterly devoid of humanity, instead representing superstardom in its broadest, brashest strokes. Celeste is by this point an utter disaster of a person, barely being able to function without booze or poppers, and who is just now coming out of the grim shadow of her latest scandal. Celeste also happens to be mother to a teenage daughter (also played by Cassidy), who is being raised by Celeste’s older sister (Stacy Martin, the heart and soul of the movie). From this point until the film’s glitzy, flashy third act (which takes place at the concert itself), watching Vox Lux is like watching a slow-motion trainwreck set to synth-pop.
Vox Lux is a lot. I mean it. It is perhaps “the most” movie of the year, in terms of just sheer exhausting energy. And indeed, there are some worthy aspects to be mined from it (Scott Walker’s haunting score, Martin’s performance, the costume design). But it is a film that examines the ruin and corrupting immortality of mega-stardom in irregular and frankly cursory fits and starts, and rather than trying to bring Celeste closer to our understanding, Corbet and Portman shove her off a cliff and we just want to watch her fall.
|
|
|
Post by bob-coppola on Feb 24, 2019 3:35:55 GMT
"Do you feel that there has been a shift in the culture where nihilist radical groups like this are increasingly keen on being perceived as superstars themselves?" "All these ultra-violent thugs want is to make headlines. I mean, if everyone stopped paying attention to them, they'd cease to exist. So would people like me, I guess."
This conversation between Celeste and a reporter pretty much sums the message Vox Lux sends to its audience: we live in a fascist culture of enablers. In a post-Nazi/Fascist, post-9/11, post-Columbine, post-everything world, we all learnt that nothing gives you more social capital - not necessarily money or the power to change politics, but the abstract idea of power, the feeling of being the center of attentions - than the shock value of violence. Wether you're a victim or the attacker, that's what people will stop and listen to.
All the atrocities we saw in the 20th century and in the turn of the millennium have left us numbed, and it has never been fully discussed, fully seen for what it was. Instead, the violence was weaponized, and combined with a cult for leadership, someone that will live our dreams that we can't make true and teach us all they know. Someone like Mussolini, or maybe Britney Spears. The ideology has become detached to the thing, as it has become a mean to an end - fame, success, power, attention. The same way a white teenage boy can plan a mass murder following the words of someone supposedly wiser but that he doesn't fully understand, someone can use pop culture and obsess over pop song without caring about its lyrics or themes. We don't necessarily believe, understand or even acknowledge the ideology of our leaders, we really just want to get where they are.
So, in the same way Corbet's first feature was about a ("ficctional") fascist governor in the WW2 background and how the fascists decoy is built in a more traditional context of world-politics, Vox Lux brings the conversation to a more modern, ordinary-life scenario. This time, it's about a high schooler who makes a deal with the evil and starts a school-shooting as means to leave his mark in a nihilistic, meaningless world, and the high schooler who falls victim to this incident and makes a deal with the devil to resignify this episode into the prelude to her fame. They're the two sides of the same coin, what changes is what buttons they're willing to push.
Celeste uses her tragedy to start a career as a pop star, and her songs and aesthetics are tacky and generic, and that's kind of the point. It doesn't really matter what she sings, the audience is there to see how the life of this brave survivor will unfold. Raffey Cassidy plays the part as a so-called naivete, a sheep in wolf's clothing who's unaware of its own facade - or maybe she's just in deep denial out of guilt. Years later, this guilt transforms her into Portman's unhinged faded star, who's life has eaten alive. Both are incredibly strong and, even if different, work together displaying the full spectrum of the post-traumetic stress disorder of moral corruption. Personally, I prefered Cassidy's more restrained performance, as it feels more nuanced and I like it when people have to play parts that are very morally ambiguous. But Portman is also really, really good. Her take on Celeste isn't hysterical for the sake of it, every nasty word she says is charged with years of remorse and pain.
It honestly isn't as hard to watch as I've been warned, it plays out like Birdman but even angrier at the world. The school shooting scene isn't that graphic, there's no nudity, the drug-use scenes are very tame. I think the shock it might cause to its viewers is due to how twisted the plot and the characters are. Corbet isn't afraid to portray bad, disgusting people, and isn't afraid to tackle an issue that is always bound to be uncomfortable. Needless to say, I adored it.
|
|
|
Post by JangoB on Mar 13, 2019 23:24:20 GMT
This was an interesting and ultimately rewarding experience, and what I appreciate most about it is that Corbet doesn't really seem to be insisting on a concrete attitude towards Celeste - he could've either made a broad spiky satire or an all too sympathetic portrayal but instead he decided to kinda blur the lines between the two thus making the film more exciting to think about. The satire's certainly present but it isn't overtly hilarious or even particularly obvious, and for a serious drama it is often clearly too campy. I like that it doesn't really pick a side or an agenda - it's almost deliberately staying away from any conclusions. Even when Corbet gets to the concert sequence, he sorta makes a point of not making it particularly enjoyable for the audience - the sound mix specifically doesn't allow the onstage performance to sound amazing, its main purpose seems to be alienation instead of making us bop (those same songs can be heard in their normal form on the soundtrack and the effect is certainly different). It's a pretty fascinating idea and I think Corbet pulls it off well. There're a couple of touches here and there that I found to be too show-offy for their own good like that sped-up Stockholm montage for example (and it just seemed like a "The Rules of Attraction" ripoff anyway) but overall I liked the direction quite a bit. Overall something was missing here but the film was still strong. And I enjoyed the fact that the Portman half of the film basically took place within a day - it felt like a play a little bit. Speaking of Portman, I found her to be pretty great. It's a turn that is simultaneously funny, moving, crazy, and she manages to make it all feel genuine and true. And I completely bought her as a pop star.
|
|
|
Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Apr 7, 2019 1:08:31 GMT
Did not like it. Whatever goodwill I built up for in the the first half is entirely quashed by the second and I'm just left with a really bad taste in my mouth. From my review: the whole shabang on letterboxd
|
|
|
Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Apr 7, 2019 1:15:04 GMT
i did love those shiny leather outfits though
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Aug 7, 2019 2:08:20 GMT
Well damn. I liked it. As Stephen said, this is the most movie of the year. I've spent an hour swirling this around, and I think my conclusion is that the balls-to-the-wall, swinging-for-the-fences approach Corbet takes here shores up the flaws in that he's never quite sure how he wants to go about saying whatever it is he wants to say. As such, every individual scene works, the characters are equally sympathetic and revolting, and the big picture is a confusing mess.
Give me more messes like this. Hell, even Portman's "what the hell was she thinking" performance fits here, as it's just as over the top and gloriously confusing as Corbet's whole "what the hell was he thinking" movie.
|
|
|
Post by Martin Stett on Aug 7, 2019 16:48:50 GMT
Now that I've had more time to think on it, I posit my main problem with this movie: It should have been a miniseries. Corbet has a lot of ideas that he wants to develop, and 2 hours isn't enough. Several parts of Celeste's life get shortchanged because of this (Stockholm, the birth of her daughter, the binge drinking incident) and need to be filled in by a narrator.
It bears a lot of thematic similarity to Satoshi Kon's masterpiece Paranoia Agent. They both deal with violence and the media relationship to it -- but Kon spends 13 half hour episodes fleshing out what he wants to say, and Corbet has two hours to get it done and it's all scattershot.
The thing is, Corbet is one hell of a director from the technical side of things. It's a fascinating watch. If you told me there was a six hour director's cut of this movie, I'd be there. And I can't say that about pretty much any other film.
|
|
Zeb31
Based
Bernardo is not believing que vous êtes come to bing bing avec nous
Posts: 2,557
Likes: 3,794
|
Post by Zeb31 on Aug 7, 2019 18:07:35 GMT
Now that I've had more time to think on it, I posit my main problem with this movie: It should have been a miniseries. Corbet has a lot of ideas that he wants to develop, and 2 hours isn't enough. Several parts of Celeste's life get shortchanged because of this (Stockholm, the birth of her daughter, the binge drinking incident) and need to be filled in by a narrator. It bears a lot of thematic similarity to Satoshi Kon's masterpiece Paranoia Agent. They both deal with violence and the media relationship to it -- but Kon spends 13 half hour episodes fleshing out what he wants to say, and Corbet has two hours to get it done and it's all scattershot. The thing is, Corbet is one hell of a director from the technical side of things. It's a fascinating watch. If you told me there was a six hour director's cut of this movie, I'd be there. And I can't say that about pretty much any other film. Pretty much my thoughts on it. Each half deserved to be its own 2-hour film in order to really go into all the themes Corbet lays out.
|
|