VoR
Take it or leave it
AKA Bradley Cooper really, really, really wants an Oscar.
I know Oscar Bait is kind of a lazy term, by good grief this was shameless. There's one conducting scene in particular which is so self indulgent and THIS IS ACTING, it just wound up making me laugh.
The whole film was decently made I guess, but mostly boring and I struggled to see the point. I left feeling I knew virtually nothing more about what drove Leonard Bernstein than I did before. His love of music is central, but also sort of taken for granted? There's never any real exploration of *why* he loves it, or even why he's so good at it, because the film begins at his first major success and never challenges that aspect of his life. He's just a great genius, and that's an accurate but boring fact.
It's also not really a very good exploration of his marriage because it totally soft-sells all the gay stuff behind meaningful glances and (I think) two fairly chaste snogs. The gay lovers are all personality-free ciphers. Carey Mulligan is good, but the lack of any real exploration of Bernstein's sexuality beyond 'it was a fact of his life' just makes her look foolish and her behaviour inexplicible. She clearly KNOWS he's a big old mo going into the marriage, but then halfway through the movie she becomes this huge bitch about it and it's just a litany of frosty looks and terse arguments. Like, you knew what you were getting into, lady!
Also maybe it's just because she is who she is, but Sarah Silverman felt SO out of place. It was like she was appearing in the SNL parody of an already fairly SNL parody coded movie.
Not terrible, but entirely surface level and pointless. If it does win a bunch of awards it'll only be because half the academy probably knew Bernstein. The film will be instantly forgotten.
I know Oscar Bait is kind of a lazy term, by good grief this was shameless. There's one conducting scene in particular which is so self indulgent and THIS IS ACTING, it just wound up making me laugh.
The whole film was decently made I guess, but mostly boring and I struggled to see the point. I left feeling I knew virtually nothing more about what drove Leonard Bernstein than I did before. His love of music is central, but also sort of taken for granted? There's never any real exploration of *why* he loves it, or even why he's so good at it, because the film begins at his first major success and never challenges that aspect of his life. He's just a great genius, and that's an accurate but boring fact.
It's also not really a very good exploration of his marriage because it totally soft-sells all the gay stuff behind meaningful glances and (I think) two fairly chaste snogs. The gay lovers are all personality-free ciphers. Carey Mulligan is good, but the lack of any real exploration of Bernstein's sexuality beyond 'it was a fact of his life' just makes her look foolish and her behaviour inexplicible. She clearly KNOWS he's a big old mo going into the marriage, but then halfway through the movie she becomes this huge bitch about it and it's just a litany of frosty looks and terse arguments. Like, you knew what you were getting into, lady!
Also maybe it's just because she is who she is, but Sarah Silverman felt SO out of place. It was like she was appearing in the SNL parody of an already fairly SNL parody coded movie.
Not terrible, but entirely surface level and pointless. If it does win a bunch of awards it'll only be because half the academy probably knew Bernstein. The film will be instantly forgotten.
