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Post by stabcaesar on Dec 27, 2023 5:04:06 GMT
I don't even find the cinematography noteworthy. There are like one to two scenes that look great, the rest of the film looks just as ugly as the script and the phony, unwatchable piece of shit performances.
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Post by mikediastavrone96 on Dec 27, 2023 5:06:39 GMT
I am a fan of Bradley Cooper. Aside from American Hustle, I like all his nominated performances, thought he put together a wonderful debut with A Star is Born, and believed this movie looked pretty damn good from the trailers. So before I sat for this movie, I was ready to get on here and say how people are being too harsh and letting their distaste for Cooper and/or his awards ambitions in this moment negatively color their opinions.
And I do think Cooper did a very good job. At least, he did very well at 2/3rds of his job. The movie in its elliptical, episode narrative moves very well, looks fantastic (I especially appreciated the blocking), and has some moments that really reach and for faint moments fully grasp greatness whether it's the expressionistic musical number in the early section or the much ballyhooed moment of Cooper showing off his conducting. His acting is even more assured, starting off a bit choppy with the younger years bit where I think he goes a bit too high on the inflections before really settling as Bernstein ages into a lower baritone. He shows an impressive lightness of touch in the more interpersonal scenes and knows how to facilitate and capture rapport with his co-actors - all because Cooper is an actor at heart.
He's such an actor, in fact, that it colors his sense of story in a way that is detrimental to this film. Because while it's cute to see Cooper and Mulligan have their budding romance, or it's some real capital-A Acting to have her be the cliché decaying cancer victim as he suffers alongside her, neither of those really come to any heart or truth to what this film suggests as a statement. The movie opens on a quote by Leonard Bernstein: "A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers." Presumably this is the statement the film wants to make. Unfortunately, the only time it cares to elaborate on this statement lies within its middle piece where it's a closet story of how Bernstein's attention diverted towards his affairs and his music while his family fell by the wayside. The best bit of contrast (and therefore tension) we get in this film is during a Thanksgiving parade scene where our leads argue about issues we've barely touched the surface on - it's an eruption without any build-up and what could have been a monumental shift in the narrative instead lands with a thud. There's a great lot of feeling in this film, but little in the way of detail and because of that I always felt at a remove from the feeling I'm seeing. Perhaps the most integrated I felt with the emotion of the movie was in the aforementioned conducting scene where we really get a fuller sense of Bernstein's emotional catharsis in his work and how that spills over to his relationship Felicia, but instead of ending on such a moment we instead drag on so we can see the capital-A Acting of Mulligan wasting away as Cooper screams into a pillow.
Part of the success of Cooper's A Star is Born I think lies in the fact the story is so base and well-worn so the best way to adapt it is to bring a liveliness to the people within that story. It's functionally acting as storytelling, and Cooper through his sincerity and chemistry with Lady Gaga was able to make that movie really soar. But when you're doing a biopic, a genre that is already heavily criticized as often being little more than vanity fair for the actors to posture and put on makeup (btw, the makeup on Cooper as Bernstein ages is fucking incredible), there needs to be a compelling take for why this is a movie. If the movie had been entirely about its middle chapter: Bernstein's queer identity, how it complicated his relationship with his family, and how he could only fully let go of himself when he channeled his energy into his music, that sounds like a compelling reason to watch this. But instead it feels like the best argument this film could make is because Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan want to put on a sizzle reel. Okay, but not good enough.
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Post by futuretrunks on Dec 27, 2023 5:51:34 GMT
It's a terrible movie, and Cooper is sometimes very bad in it. He overreached like I haven't seen in a while.
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BlackCaesar21
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You're barking up the wrong acorn!
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Maestro.
Dec 28, 2023 0:39:26 GMT
via mobile
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Post by BlackCaesar21 on Dec 28, 2023 0:39:26 GMT
I'm not very good at articulating my thoughts on films these days but I'll say my ma made me sit through this shite and I came home got high and listened to some Elmyr Bernstein.
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BlackCaesar21
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You're barking up the wrong acorn!
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Post by BlackCaesar21 on Dec 28, 2023 0:42:27 GMT
I only get very few days off and I'm angry i had to sit through this instead of being at home
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Post by countjohn on Dec 28, 2023 5:52:24 GMT
I can list a lot of individual good things about this. It looks great on both a cinematography and production level, wasn't a fan of A Star is Born but Cooper directed this well. Mulligan is good and the script is fine even if it does mine the "gay man who loved one woman" territory we saw in Bohemian Rhapsody. Obviously it's full of Bernstein's music.
But Cooper's performance is truly awful and it ruins it. I finally liked him in Licorice Pizza and Nightmare Alley but this is as try hard as he's ever been in a dramatic role. Feels like someone doing an old movie star parody on a sketch comedy show. The voice is just ridiculous and even his body language and movements feel forced like there's someone pulling puppet strings on him off camera. 100% deserves the Worst Actor Razzie but we all know that's not happening. Even though everything else about the movie ranges from decent to good the performance dominates the movie so much that there's no getting around it.
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Post by Tommen_Saperstein on Jan 15, 2024 4:50:47 GMT
this was interesting for the first act in B&W but once it entered color Cooper's performance enters the uncanny valley of old man mimicry. For the first 30 minutes I was prepared to say y'all were wrong and he's actually really good in this, but then he puts on that affected accent at that husky register and it all falls apart. They feel like two entirely different performances and sadly the bad version is the one we get for the bulk of the runtime. In the writing/directing compartment Cooper courts vanity project accusations by having nothing to say about his subject or his sexuality or really his relationship and certainly not his art but still feels his material merits an extensive one-take rendition of Bernstein's conducting of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. That Cooper prepared so hard for that scene makes it ring all the more hollow. He spent too much time and energy trying to mimic the man and not enough in figuring out what he had to say about his subject as an artist or husband, and the resulting film is pretty but dramatically inert. You'll learn as much about Bernstein from hearing his music in the background of On the Waterfront than you will from watching this movie.
Mulligan is better but there's only so much she can do with this material which skips through Felicia and Lenny's life like musical notes on a page. In one scene they have an argument and she says his heart is full of hate. Two scenes (and presumably some time) later, she watches his Mahler performance and breathlessly whispers in his ear afterwards there's no hate in his heart at all, rendering the earlier conflict weightless. Mulligan soldiers on under thick makeup and an even thicker accent into the third act when Felicia quietly succumbs to cancer but there's no saving this film from its lack of perspective on the people it purports to be about. The cinematography and makeup are effective window-dressing.
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sophiefox
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Post by sophiefox on Jan 15, 2024 4:52:58 GMT
gay
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Post by The_Cake_of_Roth on Feb 21, 2024 21:06:36 GMT
My favorite moment is when Lenny brings his boyfriend to their country house and Felicia is pissed again, and Lenny is like “Can't talk, need to compose.” So he sits at the piano, plays a few arpeggios, then walks back into the living room with a score and is like "I JUST WROTE MASS.” Perfect distillation of this useless movie. It’s amazing how this went from one of my most anticipated films of the year at one point to a thing that became a chore to watch once it hit Netflix and I saw everyone’s reactions to it. You’d think I would have watched it as soon as possible based on how often I posted in both the film’s news thread and the classical music thread... but here we are. There are scenes that might have been effective in a different movie, but here they exist in a vacuum, strung together without resonance because they lack meaningful context. None of it adds up to anything... they’re just “dramatic moments” or ideas that Cooper thought would work well as awards bait - you can practically see the wheels turning in the head of Cooper the screenwriter. Put in an unmotivated long take of him conducting a showstopping piece of music because it’s dramatic! Check. Put in an unmotivated scene of marital conflict where they argue about shit we know nothing about because it’s dramatic! Check. Put half the movie in black and white for no other reason than it looks pretty and it’ll get a cinematography nomination! Check. Oh, and make sure we haphazardly cram in a lot of his music just to remind people that he’s a composer even though that’s not at all what this movie cares about! Check. On the Waterfront. Remember that? West Side Story. Remember that? Moving on... It's hilarious how the choice to make this a movie about Leonard Bernstein feels so completely arbitrary when it might as well be about any random guy struggling with his queer identity while his wife dies of cancer. But fuck it, let’s have him be Leonard Bernstein because he’s a famous historical figure and that’s what wins Oscars! Also, Cooper’s young Bernstein voice is Paul Reiser and his old Bernstein voice is just Bradley Cooper with a cold.
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Post by stephen on Mar 12, 2024 12:35:18 GMT
So how long after Maestro blanking at the Oscars do we think it took for Bradley Cooper to delete the Bernstein family from his phone contacts?
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Post by mhynson27 on Mar 12, 2024 12:36:48 GMT
So how long after Maestro blanking at the Oscars do we think it took for Bradley Cooper to delete the Bernstein family from his phone contacts? First he has to exorcise Leonard's ghost.
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Post by stephen on Mar 12, 2024 12:44:22 GMT
So how long after Maestro blanking at the Oscars do we think it took for Bradley Cooper to delete the Bernstein family from his phone contacts? First he has to exorcise Leonard's ghost. Not gonna lie, Bradley Cooper starring in a movie playing himself trying to exorcise a role that he got so in-character for that the dead person's ghost literally came inside of him (phrasing) would be everything I would want his Oscar success story to be. Especially if he still loses at the end to a first-time nominee.
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Post by TylerDeneuve on Mar 12, 2024 12:49:48 GMT
You guys have got to stop saying Leonard Bernstein "came inside" Bradley Cooper.
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Post by stephen on Mar 12, 2024 12:59:44 GMT
You guys have got to stop saying Leonard Bernstein "came inside" Bradley Cooper. Look, I'm just repeating the man's truth.
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Post by mhynson27 on Mar 12, 2024 13:21:33 GMT
You guys have got to stop saying Leonard Bernstein "came inside" Bradley Cooper. Let my man bottom if he wants to.
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bigmilko
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Post by bigmilko on Mar 12, 2024 15:44:10 GMT
You guys have got to stop saying Leonard Bernstein "came inside" Bradley Cooper. What can we say, he just loves too much, he really does. But hes REIGNING IT IN
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Post by Joaquim on Mar 15, 2024 23:04:23 GMT
You guys have got to stop saying Leonard Bernstein "came inside" Bradley Cooper. Leonard Bernstein’s spirit consummated with Bradley Cooper
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