jeanrenoir13

Although I've seen ever Baumbach film since Squid, I've never really liked any of them. I was hoping that this one would finally be actually funny and mildly satirical of aging would-be hipsters in Brooklyn as well as younger would-be hipsters there. But I found the film boring, tedious, unwitty, and too earnest in the end. I'm going to have to give up on Baumbach. The contrast with the brilliance of Woody Allen at his best could not be stronger. Baumbach takes himself far too seriously as an artiste, and his "art" suffers. And Baumbach's simply not as sharp as Allen, much less as funny.

MIrren's excellent as always, and the whole cast is good enough (wasting the great Danny Bruhl, but whatever). The production values are great, in the "quality picture" tradition. And it's hard not to be moved at times. But the whole movie is ultimately an incredibly shameless machine for emotional manipulation and beating the dead horse of **** evil for the easiest effects imaginable. In fact, the hard truth is that the movie's this year's annual Holocaust movie clearly made by the Israel Lobby neocon wing of Hollywood to keep the American masses Pavlovian **** for "Never again!" so that when the neocons roll it out again to con the American masses into supporting Tom Cotton's proxy war for Israel for "regime change" in Iran, the **** will bite yet again, in an uncontrollable reflex that has been brilliantly drilled into them by Israel Lobby Hollywood for so many years now for just such an occasion. The attention to Pavlovian detail is such that they've made the heroine father look just like Stefan Zweig! How's that for tugging at the heartstrings of the literate, the ones most in danger of dismissing the movie for its shameless manipulations. Nothing is harder to make a good film about than the Holocaust, because any work of art has to avoid cliches and stock responses like the plague. Manipulative schlock like Woman in Gold does NOTHING but trade in both. It looks so good, and Mirren's such a good actress that the film might strike the unwary as better than it is. But Stephen Holden's 30 ranking for the Times nails it for what it is: crowd-pleasing junk.

Disappointed by this overrated film. Incredibly conventional coming-of-age movie--the kid vs. the mentor who drives him hard to "make a man" out of him. Total cliche. Teller even LOOKS just like a Jewish Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid. An Officer and a Gentleman and the first hour of Full Metal Jacket were much, much more better versions of this very familiar tale than this fairly lame, and totally predictable, film. J.T. Simmons is good, but not in the class with Louis Gossett, Jr, or Lee Ermey. And Richard Gere was much better than Teller in the "determined kid" slot.

Preposterously overrated movie. 2001 was a work of genius, because Kubrick himself was an authentic artistic genius. Christopher Nolan is merely a creator of dumb, empty spectacle. Comparing Interstellar to 2001 is like comparing Stephen King to Dostoevsky. The characters are shallow and vapid. The script is a collection of dumb cliches about family and love guaranteed to rope in the multiplex crowd. The score is strident and bombastic. Etc. Interstellar is the exact OPPOSITE of 2001 in every way, on every level--a stupid Hollywood crowd pleaser appealing to both shallow sci-fi and video game brains, instead of a profound mockery of the pretensions of sci-fi and scientific rationalism itself in the face of the unknowable chaos of the universe in 2001. Kubrick merely used Arthur C. Clarke in order to make fun of his kind of enthusiasm for and overconfidence in human rational understanding. Interstellar is right down on Arthur C. Clarke's level. No wonder it will be a much bigger hit than 2001 was, since 2001 naturally truly baffled people when it came out, whereas Intstellar provides a sort of momentary sense of disorientation while ending Hollywood style in a dumb "explanation" of it all, not to mention ending with the idiotic combo of the hero completing his "quest" AND fulfilling the inevitable Hollywood "love" theme, all in one dumb gesture. Contrast that ending with Kubrick's deliberate total subversion of Hollywood, not just in 2001 but in every film he ever made. There was a reason Kubrick lived in London.

An okay movie. Far from great, or even particularly intelligent. Just the ultimate Sixties feminist cliche tale of "finding myself," "loving myself," and "affirming all the dumb, sleazy things I did" because "I gotta be me" and "without ALL I've done I wouldn't be the wonderful woman I now am," etc., etc. Compare the skills and brains involved in a really good movie like Force Majeure with the level of intelligence and art in Wild. No contest. Witherspoon and everyone else is "good," but trite, since all the roles are trite themselves. Hornby did the best he could with the material he was given, but that material itself is the core problem with this film--the trite vision of Strayed herself. Her book was like a machine for great sales to female book clubs, the people who centrally determine best sellers in America, because it seems a little "edgy" in their context, but is finally very flattering in an "I am woman!" and so are you way.

Another genius sign of the brilliant zeitgeist in cinema internationally in 2014, when the best films have never been smarter. Though wildly different in so many ways, this film reminded me of the tour de force genius of Birdman. Both films are so smart, both films are made with unbelievable precision in every aspect of their craft, both are gorgeous, both come very close to tragedy, and both films pull back from the edge, because going over would be a dumb cliche both films are too starkly smart, honest, and realistic about life to entertain.