Music

Ziegler’s performance is the best thing about Music. For friends and family members of those on the spectrum, it’s a revelation and an acknowledgment that people with autism can be remarkable without having remarkable abilities like those found in Rain Man or Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

The trouble begins with a seasick lurching between fantasy and reality, it’s redoubled by subject matter that can’t support that, and it hits a whole arpeggio of duff notes with the casting.

There's nothing fun about panning a feature by a first-time director, especially when it seems to come from a place of good intentions, but Music, a musical fantasy drama about an autistic teen, is bad. Mystifyingly bad. Verging on "What were they thinking?" bad.

This movie is literally and figuratively saying music can save your life, but the execution is all treacle and dust—overly sweet and utterly empty.

An old-fashioned piece of shameless hokum, Sia’s Music might be hilarious if it weren’t so offensive.

Music is a bad movie, but I wish that were all it was. I can handle its poor pacing and stiff dialogue, but even doing research and writing an essay on the film’s problematic elements pre-release were not enough to prepare me for how harmful Music is to autistic people.

Music is totally unwatchable.

It was really beautiful

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

(Mauro Lanari) Sia's world is visionary and uplifting: her music, her videos, her film. Consequently the autism theme is a McGuffin to express her "feel-good movie", and I see no problem in finally treating autism like any other human condition, freeing it from that protected reserve aura that surrounds it. Sia is a debutant and his musical is full of flaws, in my opinion the most serious is the intention of wanting to soothe a poorly present and presented drama: compare "Nobody said it was easy" (Coldplay - "The Scientist", 2002) with "Nobody said it would be easy" (Kate Hudson - "Easy", 2021).

Worse than problematic. Imagine every downside of surrounding yourself with sycophants who love the smell of your farts and refuse to say "no" to you as a creator. Now, play all of these downsides out to their extent and you get "Music," a film that's not only hopelessly empty and trite, but apt to cause real-life harm. Like, demonstrably. I won't even get into the controversies at hand because they're honestly infuriating, with implications that can get dark pretty fast, so I'll just leave you all with this; there's a scene in here where Sia appears as a fictionalized version of herself, promoting a practice involving her smuggling medicine to third-world countries. I owe you an apology, M. Night Shyamalan in "Lady In The Water" - THIS is the most self-absorbed **** I've ever seen. With music-video-like breaks in narrativity that make absolutely no sense and some profoundly cringe-worthy dialogue, "Music" has to be one of the most tone-deaf attempts at handling a concept with such sensitive subject matter that I've ever seen in the big leagues.

There are several ideas here, that's undeniable, but where did those ideas wanted to go? I have no **** clue. I'm aware of the controversy this film has generated, and of the harsh criticism from its director - the pop singer; Sia- has received for her work, but since my knowledge about what autism implies is not deep, I will only judge based on what I saw, and what I saw is that Music is basically a really long and diverse music video, in which a drama story was introduced in the middle. It's an ambitious attempt, but it becomes apparent too quickly that the director doesn't have the talent, or the experience, or the tact, much less the necessary and appropriate expertise to be able to carry out her story. It was quite disappointing, but I must say that I invite people to see it and form their own opinion, because talking about it while saying that you will not see it, whether for some personal or impersonal reason, is simply an empty opinion without any real argument.