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Post by stephen on Dec 21, 2023 2:54:43 GMT
Celluloid confectionery, this was -- glossy but ultimately insubstantial, as gossamer as cotton candy. Bradley Cooper's sophomore effort feels like a regression from the confident (if somewhat misguided) energy he brought to his debut, and while he had the grace to allow Carey Mulligan to take top billing in what I assume was a bald-faced ploy to curry some faux humility, this nevertheless felt like the most extreme yet passionless vanity project since Warren Beatty's heyday. Cooper and Mulligan both get saddled with unwieldy trans-Atlantic accents and while that is a hard one to pull off without it sounding phony, neither actor really acquits themselves favourably with that articulated albatross. This performance does make the most sense as one that will net Cooper's elusive golden statuette, but it really is a shame that just two years after he knocked my socks off with a one-two punch in Licorice Pizza and Nightmare Alley (which finally made me appreciate his talents and made me think he'd turned a corner with me), Maestro felt like a step back.
What annoys me is that I don't really get the sense that Cooper (or anyone associated with the film) gave a shit about Bernstein, and I didn't leave the film thinking that I'd been granted any sort of insight into the man or his world.
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Post by finniussnrub on Dec 21, 2023 2:59:54 GMT
Agreed, particularly your last point, honestly it felt to me like Cooper made the film solely to get to imitate Bernstein's conducting style.
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Post by stephen on Dec 21, 2023 3:02:25 GMT
Agreed, particularly your last point, honestly it felt to me like Cooper made the film solely to get to imitate Bernstein's conducting style. And that extends to behind the camera, as Cooper gets to imitate a director. Seriously, for as much as I hated how he turned A Star Is Born into the Bradley Cooper piss-his-pants-for-an-Oscar show at the expense of Gaga, at least that movie had some semblance of heart and a vibe that made me feel he was passionate about it. But this felt like Cooper licking his wounds after losing to Rami Malek that he decided to hell with it, they want a hollow performance of a musical legend, I'll give them one.
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Post by Billy_Costigan on Dec 21, 2023 3:24:12 GMT
Mulligan is excellent but the film is a total bore. It feels like the same complicated relationship drama we've seen a hundred times. There's nothing new or interesting about the story. For a passion project, I expected more. It comes across as Oscar Bait: The Movie
Besides the performances, direction and cinematography are the highlights. Still, a big step back from A Star is Born.
Better Cooper Film A Star is Born >>> Maestro
Better Cooper Performance A Star is Born >>> Maestro
Best Actor 2024 Giamatti > Cooper
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Post by DeepArcher on Dec 21, 2023 3:55:46 GMT
As a longtime Cooper skeptic, I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected and it's continued to grow in my estimation since I saw it a couple days ago. It still has a lot of flaws (the lead performances too rarely transcend beyond the grating vocal impressions, the third act becomes a chore in much the same way that A Star is Born's did), but I really admired the eschewing of a lot of conventional biopic tropes and thought it looked absolutely gorgeous (I'm not even really a Libatique guy, but this is probably his best work) and has a handful of knockout scenes, even if those great individual moments don't necessarily amount to a cohesive whole. The performance of Mahler's 2nd is a truly transcendent moment that I'd put against Oppenheimer's Trinity Test or any other sequence for best of the year.
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Archie
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Post by Archie on Dec 21, 2023 7:41:39 GMT
LOOK AT ME I'M ACTING!: The Movie
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Post by wallsofjericho on Dec 21, 2023 12:50:11 GMT
Mulligan was tremendous but I agree. Just felt like a bunch of scenes thrown together with no flow. You never get an insight what made Leonard so special as a performer which I know Cooper wanted to concentrate on the marriage. It feels like the movie could have just been made about any Tom, Dick or Harry.
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Post by Joaquim on Dec 21, 2023 14:20:34 GMT
Judging by a lot of the comments on this thread, it sounds like this movie is exactly what I’m expecting it to be
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Post by ibbi on Dec 21, 2023 14:21:18 GMT
The number of levels on which this movie blows my mind is truly astounding. Not least of which is the guy who got away with turning A Star is Born into a movie more about the guy than the girl in the age of FEMINISM now getting away with casting two goy to play two non-goy, and getting the woman who CRIED AND CRIED about 'Jewface' in Hollywood to be in the movie with them. How does he keep pulling this off??? More importantly, it's another of those greatest hits screenplays that has all of the BIG moments without any of the smaller ones to make the big ones matter. The entire thing seems to me like one gigantic miscalculation, its intent to do nothing but win awards. It is pure Oscar bait, of absolutely zero worth, and right at the centre of it we have lifted Jennifer Jason Leigh straight out of The Hudsucker Proxy timed her by two, and stuck the two of them in the middle of a serious drama where everyone else is acting like a normal person. It's complete phony bullshit. You know what Lenny said about phony gestures producing phony sounds, don't you, Brad? Cinematography is the only nomination it will deserve.
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Post by JangoB on Dec 21, 2023 14:25:10 GMT
Well I found it wonderful - eschewing biopic tropes in favor of a ripe and utterly moving melodrama which felt almost Sirk-ian? Sign me up. To me the episodic nature of the film was like a breath of fresh air in the swamp of conventional life summaries this genre usually has to offer. Scenes felt as if they were photographs, gradually coming together and forming a full album of a marriage. Or put it this way: it's a portrait of a relationship between a man and his two muses which Cooper paints not with straight (no pun intended) lines but with dots, each of them colorful and leaving its own mark. Now, he may not be Georges Seurat but by the end the portrait felt complete to me and I was very touched by it. And I have to say that the two central performances blew me away. They are flamboyant with their accents and mannerisms and so on but I never got the impression that I was watching try-hard actors because underneath all that musicality (which is what it was to me) Cooper and Mulligan managed to unveil the souls and the hearts of the people at the core of the film. And that's what I love about it - the film is less about going Wikipedia on Bernstein and more about glimpsing within, inside his life, sometimes to the point of such intimacy that I felt like I was seeing something i wasn't supposed to. Is it a vanity project (a term I quite dislike btw)? IDK, I got the impression I was watching a passion project instead. Because I did feel Cooper's passion for Bernstein. And for filmmaking too: if ASIB proved that he could direct, this proves that he can direct with a voice. A bit sad to see y'all go "Bye, Felicia" on this but you know... there can be a 100 people on a board and 99 of them don't believe in a film... but all it takes is one. Happy to oblige
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Post by pacinoyes on Dec 21, 2023 14:46:46 GMT
I like this waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more than I thought I would and it's still a 6.5 / 10 at best for me.......the fact that this movie - a colossal ego trip (see ibbi above, Amen^), that NOBODY has any passion for, from a guy who has been nodded a lot and STILL isn't "overdue" to win could be seen as "the frontrunner" for BA over a guy in every scene in a billion dollar BP machine is baffling
The BA Oscar race - coming after last year's battle of the lightweights (Butler / Fraser) - is at a low point tbh
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Maestro.
Dec 21, 2023 14:53:52 GMT
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Post by ibbi on Dec 21, 2023 14:53:52 GMT
the film is less about going Wikipedia on Bernstein and more about glimpsing within, inside his life, sometimes to the point of such intimacy that I felt like I was seeing something i wasn't supposed to. But this is just my problem with it. It seems clear to me that contradictions are what he’s aiming for. That seems the case from the opening quote, and from his throwing the title up over her face at the end, and that’s what you get if you contrast the public life with the personal one too. I just don’t know how much the latter life matters unless you do a better job establishing the former, and aside from the one-shot of him conducting, is there anything more here beyond banal lip service to capture what he was? Why the film should be titled the way it is? In that Snoopy parade scene (the greatest moment of artistic contrast in the entire film), they’re arguing about stuff we’ve seen nothing of. It’s just posturing. I do get/like the Sirk comparison. But hell, I had exactly the same problem with All That Heaven Allows.
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Post by futuretrunks on Dec 21, 2023 14:58:44 GMT
I agree with ibbi on this one. Strong cinematography but otherwise felt like a feature length SNL skit. I feel kind of embarrassed for everyone involved as this should have one Oscar nomination for Libatique and a bunch of Razzie noms.
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Post by JangoB on Dec 21, 2023 15:58:41 GMT
the film is less about going Wikipedia on Bernstein and more about glimpsing within, inside his life, sometimes to the point of such intimacy that I felt like I was seeing something i wasn't supposed to. But this is just my problem with it. It seems clear to me that contradictions are what he’s aiming for. That seems the case from the opening quote, and from his throwing the title up over her face at the end, and that’s what you get if you contrast the public life with the personal one too. I just don’t know how much the latter life matters unless you do a better job establishing the former, and aside from the one-shot of him conducting, is there anything more here beyond banal lip service to capture what he was? Why the film should be titled the way it is? In that Snoopy parade scene (the greatest moment of artistic contrast in the entire film), they’re arguing about stuff we’ve seen nothing of. It’s just posturing. I do get/like the Sirk comparison. But hell, I had exactly the same problem with All That Heaven Allows. I actually like this movie just because the cafe near my uni was named Maestro (true story). Some great cherry pie there... I miss those days.
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Post by stabcaesar on Dec 21, 2023 18:56:39 GMT
This was a chore to finish. A complete slog. It'd be a travesty if Cooper and Mulligan get in over more deserving candidates.
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avnermoriarti
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Post by avnermoriarti on Dec 21, 2023 19:34:11 GMT
This is a disaster. It's Bohemian Rhapsody#nohomo all over again, just handsomely photographed. Cooper saw what it took Rami to get the oscar and he wanted it: a surface-level ride into the endlessly active mind of the conductor and then trying to translate that rythm into the editing and sacrificing any oportunity to make sense of what is going on screen, it's just a series of scenes of people that come and go, the love interest appears, they fall in love, close their eyes and try to guess each other's thoughts, someone's carring a baby, another baby appears, grown up baby gets a job, they're all old and life happens.... who was who ? I have no clue. I fail to make sense of any of that, it's an entire season of a soap opera trimmed into 2 hours, and I love Carla Murillo (hermana!!!) but this is probably the first time I found her boring and annoying relying too thickly on old-school acting tics to appear old and sick. And the real-life footage at the end of any biopic should be banned for once and for all.
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Post by ibbi on Dec 21, 2023 20:05:05 GMT
I love Carla Murillo (hermana!!!) The first time I read this I thought "Hmm, is that the costume designer?"
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Post by wallsofjericho on Dec 21, 2023 22:05:35 GMT
I remember Pauline Kael calling Kevin Costner 'plays with a camera' for taking so many close up shots of his face in Dances with Wolves. I think the same could apply to Cooper here.
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Post by ibbi on Dec 21, 2023 22:35:08 GMT
I remember Pauline Kael calling Kevin Costner 'plays with a camera' for taking so many close up shots of his face in Dances with Wolves. I think the same could apply to Cooper here. I thought this guy was more into himself than Mel was in Braveheart. They’re not just closeups, but lingering appreciative closeups. The actor-director thing, by its nature, is just kind of cringe.
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Javi
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Post by Javi on Dec 22, 2023 1:05:19 GMT
What a big phony turd. I never had any strong feelings about Bradley Cooper one way or the other. As an actor, he’s marginally likable in a self-satisfied way. As a director, he’s pretty bad (I never understood why those two pedants in A Star is Born warranted all that pageantry and flash). But this second outing as an actor-director on a quest to win a billion Oscars is the most nauseating display of narcissism in a long time. Is there anything worse than a mediocre narcissist? A great narcissist—a Peter O’Toole—can be a magnificent thing. But this guy just sucks people dry and gives them nothing back. Cooper plays Bernstein with Rasputin intensity, looking totally demented, like the ventriloquist dummy from Magic. There’s a special kind of perversity in Cooper the director fixing the camera on Cooper the actor giving this performance. The camera lingers on, hopelessly scanning for signs of intelligent life or a shred of honesty, for what seems like hours. Then Cooper the director will shoot random conversations from a kilometer away, to atone for the close-ups? In the fossilized role of the suffering wife, Carey Mulligan’s approach seems to be to play her as a 100-year-old woman from the start. Mulligan does a lot of smiling (and is less and less charming with each smile), but Felicia is internally a sullen, petrified woman, and her metamorphosis into premature harpy is supposed to be some awesome tragedy. Mulligan’s only function in the movie seems to be to radiate vague waves of discontent. The way she plays this woman, of course she’ll get cancer later on. Cancer is the whole point of her character arc. Fortunately, Cooper’s wisdom and ultimate message saves the day: while Mulligan/Felicia may indeed be rather mediocre compared to Cooper/Bernstein, at least they got to have Cooper/Bernstein in their lives. Isn’t that wonderful? One wonders why half this monstrosity is in black and white? Is this how Cooper the “lowly” movie artist imagine the lives of “real” artists to be? If so, he can’t even sell the cultural atmosphere properly. The movie has no atmosphere beyond Cooper and Mulligan, and some of the extras speak in funny Mel Brooks accents, like people in old Nazi spoofs. There’s a way out, though. Since no one in this movie believes a word they’re saying, and no one is paying the slightest attention to what the other actors are doing, we can easily assume this same stance. Twenty minutes in, I’d stopped caring about what anyone was saying, which is very easy to do after the scene where Cooper discovers Freud. Cooper: “I had a dream I killed my father”. Long black and white silence... Mulligan artfully moves her hand so we can get a better view of Cooper’s nipples… Mulligan: “I associated my father’s smell with safety”. In another scene, Cooper discovers Eisenstein, and Bernstein’s shadow turns into Ivan the Terrible, Part III. The movie is full of enlightened little moments. Is there a more embarrassing scene this year than the long conducting-in-a-cathedral orgy? Absolutely nothing in the film leads up to this, and there’s no fallout. But there he is, mimicking Bernstein the conductor, waving his hands, possessed by the music. At one point, Bernstein laments that he hasn’t done much creating, that the age of great artistic creation is over. And Cooper, who conveniently agrees with him, might actually believe that this mimicry of his is the closest we can get to greatness these days. It’s tough out there in 2023. Magic, for reference:
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Maestro.
Dec 22, 2023 1:26:21 GMT
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Post by futuretrunks on Dec 22, 2023 1:26:21 GMT
The nasality Cooper is using vocally is so misjudged. It just comes across as comical, when his physical affectation ought to be as dead serious as Jamie Foxx in Ray or PSH in Capote or thereabouts. This movie is almost unreal in how insanely ill-conceived it is. No progression, no development, it just skips around manically. I was laughing during the cathedral scene.
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Post by futuretrunks on Dec 22, 2023 1:58:15 GMT
Cooper's good when he crawls into bed with her. Got through the caricature for a bit.
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SZilla
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Post by SZilla on Dec 22, 2023 5:12:39 GMT
Its got bits and pieces that are good but altogether it feels very disjointed.
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Post by Joaquim on Dec 24, 2023 14:17:29 GMT
This somehow managed to be worse than I expected. And at the exact moment I was thinking “I can’t fucking stand this movie” 10mins in, fucking Sarah Silverman graces my screen to make everything even more unbearable. I actually said aloud “oh noooo” when she appeared. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever audibly reacted so negatively to an actor popping up in a movie. It’s not because it was Sarah Silverman popping up but rather because it was Sarah Silverman popping up in this film at this exact moment in the film when I was already thinking that it was absolutely unbearable
So many actors will transform themselves into their character, lose themselves in that character. Bradley Cooper slapped on a fake nose and called it a day. Cooper just picked the guy he thought he was the most like and turned him into a vehicle to comment about his own career, personal life and his place in the industry so it should come as no surprise that this movie is just as confused about its identity as Cooper himself is. It’s Bradley Cooper playing himself as Bernstein. This is like if teenaged me tried making a biopic of Kurt Cobain
I think how you feel about Cooper will ultimately determine how you feel about the movie, which is not how a biopic should leave you in the end. I don’t hate Cooper, I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan either. I’m somewhere in the middle but like I’ve made clear in this post I could not stand his approach to this project. I couldn’t stand the usually reliable Mulligan either. Some of the technical aspects were nice but for the most part this was one of the most grating movie watching experiences I’ve had in a long time. 4/10 it is. I think the tweet below perfectly sums up Cooper’s totally misguided approach to this project
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Post by Brother Fease on Dec 25, 2023 2:03:52 GMT
Well I found it wonderful - eschewing biopic tropes in favor of a ripe and utterly moving melodrama which felt almost Sirk-ian? Sign me up.To me the episodic nature of the film was like a breath of fresh air in the swamp of conventional life summaries this genre usually has to offer. Scenes felt as if they were photographs, gradually coming together and forming a full album of a marriage. Or put it this way: it's a portrait of a relationship between a man and his two muses which Cooper paints not with straight (no pun intended) lines but with dots, each of them colorful and leaving its own mark. Now, he may not be Georges Seurat but by the end the portrait felt complete to me and I was very touched by it. And I have to say that the two central performances blew me away. They are flamboyant with their accents and mannerisms and so on but I never got the impression that I was watching try-hard actors because underneath all that musicality (which is what it was to me) Cooper and Mulligan managed to unveil the souls and the hearts of the people at the core of the film. And that's what I love about it - the film is less about going Wikipedia on Bernstein and more about glimpsing within, inside his life, sometimes to the point of such intimacy that I felt like I was seeing something i wasn't supposed to. Is it a vanity project (a term I quite dislike btw)? IDK, I got the impression I was watching a passion project instead. Because I did feel Cooper's passion for Bernstein. And for filmmaking too: if ASIB proved that he could direct, this proves that he can direct with a voice. A bit sad to see y'all go "Bye, Felicia" on this but you know... there can be a 100 people on a board and 99 of them don't believe in a film... but all it takes is one. Happy to oblige We're in 100% agreement. I do think we have ESPN. I am thinking 9/10 for me. This might turn into my annual "table pounder film". What you wrote is pretty much what I felt. Cooper made a rather unique biopic about Bernstein. It focuses on the marriage aspect of his life, avoids sentimentality, and allows the audience to cast their own judgment on him. I very much enjoyed his transition from scene to scene, and how the color scheme, character behavior changes depending on the movie decade. Big props to his make-up team.
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