Probably more mindblowing for an American audience that barely gets any exposure to this kind of material from its own industry. For my taste, Guadagnino plays it way too safe. I was waiting for it to push beyond the melodrama into something more wild or messed up, and I never really got that. He's constantly flexing with impressive camerawork, great editing and a fantastic score, but what is it all in service of? There's not a lot more to this than very basic melodrama. Tennis is used a metaphor for innuendo and relationships, which becomes a bit eye-rolling as the film goes along. On top of that it's not nearly as sexy as some people are suggesting, it feels like a lot of foreplay and innuendo without a real pay-off at any point. His camera doesn't shy away from nudity or sweat, and Trent Reznor's score puts in a lot of work in turning up the heat, but you want it to push beyond that at some point. For me it doesn't really develop into anything surprising and the conclusion it ultimately goes with feels kinda lame because of it. Still, it does a good job at intriguing you with the personal struggles of the three main characters, all of which are well portrayed by the actors. Zendaya is a bit hard to read at times, though it could be intentional with the character she's playing. There's enough merit to the complexity of the characters and technical aspects that kept me from being bored, but the entire time I kept thinking about how much more interesting this could be with someone like Paul Verhoeven at the helm.
6/10
[9.5/10] The most ingenious choice that Greta Gerwig’s Little Women makes is to chop up the story so as to juxtapose present and past. It not only immediately marks this adaptation as distinct from its predecessors, but helps to recontextualize and connect different parts of the story to make it feel new again.
The audience has a chance to meet and appreciate Freidrich before Laurie has burrowed into their hearts. By the same token, the joy and connection between Amy and Laurie can be front and center from the get-go, without springing it on the viewer halfway through the story. And the bookend approach allows Gerwig to put Jo’s drive and travails as a writer into the spotlight early.
But the biggest advantage it confers on the film is how it allows Little Women to constantly contrast the lives that these young girls imagined they would lead one day, with the lives each finds themselves inhabiting in the future. Like the novel it’s based on, Gerwig’s adaptation is anchored squarely around considering the wildest dreams of its titular set of sisters, and measuring them against the paths actually available to women in their time, and the places their choices and passions take them. The jumps back and forth and time allow Gerwig to check expectation with reality, to trace cause and effect, and to resolve the two with poignance and grace.
It also allows Gerwig and company to flesh out each of the young women at the center of the narrative. Jo March still commands the story and the screen. Saoirse Ronan throws herself into the role, conveying all the punch, heedlessness, and subtle vulnerabilities of the character with endearing abandon. It is both a dream role and a hard one, but Ronan makes it look effortless.
And yet, this adaptation makes time for the other March sisters to falter and flourish. Amy is vivid and real from the jump, with her questioning of her own talents, her sense of being second to Jo, and her truth-telling relationship with Laurie put front and center. Meg’s chance at a life of elegance and plenty, the love that pulls her away from it, and the joys and hardships of that choice are given time to breathe. And Beth remains the heart of the film -- still a little too pure for this world, but one who suffers for her own goodness, reminds a kindly neighbor of what’s been lost, and spurs her sister to take up what she’s put down.
All the while, Little Women is utterly gorgeous to look at through the March Sisters’ misadventures. Gerwig and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux capture the bucolic beauty of scene after scene draped in New England splendor. The pair construct tableaus of faraway elegance and local beauty in turn. But these visuals aren’t gratuitous. Beyond making the movie a treat to watch, it helps sell the contrast at the heart of the film. Scenes set in Jo’s youth have a golden hue, an inviting glow that conveys the idyllic, hopeful tone of those early days. And the ones set in her adulthood are darker and starker, visually communicating the various cold realities the March family has had to grapple with in later years.
As necessary as it is to contend with those cold realities, it’s just plain fun to vicariously share in the joy that Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy share with their mother and friends in their family home. Apart from its structural choices, apart from its character focus, the greatest strength of Gerwig’s Little Women is how well it captures this sense of young people at play, of a headstrong young woman in their element, and that unfathomable, spontaneous vigor of youth.
The March Sisters, and their friends and close confidants, fight and babble and hug and exalt together. There’s a move toward Gilmore-esque speed and overlap in conversation after conversation, expressing the happy chaos that envelops these lives. This story is founded on the breadth of possibility forged in such a simple, familiar environment, on the pleasures and satisfactions found despite absences and meager means, on blessings shared and passed around. The warmth of the March household would not work if those who orbit and inhabit it, did not seem so real in their rough-and-tumble interactions and simple joys.
Those joys, however, are meant to run up against the expectations of adulthood that clash with allowances of youth. That’s the role Aunt March plays -- the naysayer to the slack existence her brother and his wife and children have made for each other. But Gerwig does not make her a villain. Instead, she is merely practical, a woman who knows from her own experiences which choices are permitted and which invite difficulties, delivered with an amusing wryness that makes her endearing even as she aims to stifle her nieces’ dreams.
That’s the crux of Gerwig’s adaptation. The March sisters imagine wondrous lives for one another, borne on the backs of each’s great talent. Jo pictures herself as a bold writer in the big city who never marries anything but her art. Meg sees glimpses of a life where she’ll never have to work, where there’s time for things like acting and society and beautiful dresses. Amy envisions the life of the genius painter overseas who stands with giants. And each finds those dreams running aground on the many limitations of the real world, with tethers made extra taut for the declaratively fairer sex.
All except for Beth, whose dreams lie in the simple doing of good, the making of music for those around to hear it rather than for the masses, despite her prodigious abilities. She is the cinch of Little Women, not merely in her death which brings the March sister home. But in her life of quiet kindness at home, in her peace with what must come and the joy to be found despite it, a joy they found together in the attic and can still share and revive no matter how big or little they are now.
Jo, Amy, and Meg each regains a measure of that golden glow in the shadow of the house they grew up in. Amy loses the artists life in Paris she imagines, but finds happiness in a partner who vindicates her talents and for whom love triumphs over station. Meg is denied by circumstance of the beautiful things and easy life she once pictured, but is buoyed by the care and satisfaction of family and a life built with the man she loves. Even Jo turns away from the “spicy” stories that sell to stuffy cigar-smoking New York publishers and finds her truth, finds her greatness, in the bonds fraught and familiar at home, with a winking-but-joyous connection to a beau of her own. And each is seen sharing the fruits of their talents, passing them on to a new generation of young men and women.
There’s a degree of wish-fulfillment to the close of the film, a heartstring-tugging image of familial warmth in a bucolic setting. But Gerwig earns that warmth. The happiness crafted in a humble home is measured against the metes and bounds of the wider world, and found no less worthy. The choices afforded to women of any station at the time are reckoned with and suffered in, with the ensuing joys and small, self-possessed rebellions made more potent in that unfair crucible. The losses each suffers, the distance between the lives they dreamed and the lives they live, is laid bare in the cuts between past and present.
But in the end, Gerwig does as Alcott did, and makes the fulfillment each chooses meaningful by those terms. The hardships great and small each endures, make it more than a publisher-mandated happy ending when, despite that difference between past imagination and present truth, each of these little women realizes they’re living the lives they truly want.
I loved it!
I am not the musical guy. I do not like the music, it feels so soft - so mainstream - so "happy everywhere" or "sadness overload".
And I think that musicals should be watched live in a theatre and not in a movie, because the story, songs etc. are written to be watched live. Just like movies should not be performed in theatre.
But I have to admit: Les Misérables was great! The actresses and actors were amazing, the music wonderful. But you have to watch the movie with good headphones - or if u lucky with a good sound system. :o)
The acting of Anne Hathaway was amazing. Big love! Just watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzNVmZfNoa8
The interpretation and renewed songs are perfect. Just Russel Crowe potential of singing was not the best, but it did not bother me at all. One of my favourite scenes / sing parts by the way is this clip. Sorry for the subs there:
http://youtu.be/q29OOI6Y6ig?t=1m38s
So even if you are not into musicals, give recommend to give it a try and you might get surprised and you gonna like it.
9 out of 10 points for this "movie". But if you didn't like the two youtube links I put here - you better won't watch the movie.
I've seen more than a few films of the era, and none of them equal what was done here. The story is not original. It could, in fact, be considered a remake of Singing in the Rain, but it is so much more.
Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo were fantastic! They would have both been silent stars. They didn't need dialog to express themselves. I am, of course, anxious to see OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies just to see them both in a talkie.
They couldn't have picked better support than John Goodman and James Cromwell. I have seen both many times and consider them outstanding actors. They brought their talents here and no one could have done it better.
I would be remiss if I didn't give props to Uggie, who payed The Dog. I'll have to check out Mr. Fix It to see more of him.
The cinematography was brilliant, and the music sublime. I have no doubt that I will see this film many times. In fact, I wish it would come back to the theater so I could see it there.
Kudos to Michel Hazanavicius for an outstanding film. I am really hoping to see more of his work in the future.
From the opening number, that nearly stops the show before it starts, Cabaret lets you know what it's all about. The devilish Master of Ceremonies prances and preens and welcomes the audience to the performance with a sinister, almost knowing grin among the ribald revelry over which he provides. Here is your escape; here is your distraction, but what you are running from is never truly gone. The show, literally and figuratively, features a reflection of its audience, and as broad and exaggerated and whimsical as that reflection grows, there's still a palpable strain of darkness running through, that may be pushed off to the side, but never truly avoided.
Such is the journey of Sally and Brian, who stumble into each other's life, each escaping into the joys of hedonism, of la vie boheme, to escape a certain brokenness at their core, an attempt to outrun the little thoughts gnawing away at them, to fill the holes in their lives with liquor and sex, or invented fathers and dreams of stardom. There's a sadness at the heart of Sally Bowles, belied by her free-spirited whimsy and the breezy air with which she carries herself. And Brian too, though more of a Cipher, finds himself wrestling with his own feelings about his sexuality, with a guilt at what he deems to be deviance in a culture where a group utterly intolerant of his lifestyle, and his friends, are growing in power and influence. Each can only run for so long, can take refuge in one another for so long, before realizing that as wonderful as it can be, it's a temporary escape, a fantasy, that they would not be able to sustain in the long run, and losing that dream is as sad and sweet as it is necessary.
It's easy to see the influence Cabaret has had in the nearly fifty years after the film version's release. Rent invokes its intoxicating and yet very fraught depiction of the bohemian life, of individuals on the outskirts of society finding each other, finding patrons who wish to dabble in that life without plunging too deep, and the dizzying highs and crestfallen lows that come with it. Chicago borrows its brilliantly deployed conceit of contrasting the personal dramas between Sally, Brian, and their cohort, with cuts to numbers and routines on the cabaret stage that give shading to these events.
That stage, and the way the film preserves the theatrical nature of its source material, is a key to what makes Cabaret so enthralling. Director Bob Fosse's camera is intimate in Brian and Sally's scene, where it lingers with the pair or sits still and watches the two of them just breathe and be together. But there's an amazing energy in the cinematography during those stage performances, with swift cuts and zooming shots that dart around the stage to give the viewer multiple vantage points of the amazing phantasmagoria the Master of Ceremonies has constructed.
And that Emcee, who guides the audience on screen and on the other side of it through this gaping glimpse at Berlin in the 1930s, ties the film together. Joel Grey oozes an almost sinister charm, and shines in every moment he's on the stage. In particular, his rendition of "If You Could See Her Through My Eyes" achieves so much, and conveys so many layers in a production that could easily have come off as farce. There's a ridiculousness to a man singing a love song to an erstwhile ape, but the subtext of it, made text in Grey's last whispered line communicates both the genuine melancholy that underlies the phenomenon he's signing about it, a sense that he's playing the audience, stoking their expectations and feeding them the chops their licking their lips for, but doing so purposefully, in a manner so playful and subversive that the meaning goes over their heads. It's a captivating, devastating number.
And those two adjectives capture the whole of Cabaret as well. Those performances, from Liza Minnelli's extraordinary voice, to Fosse's crisp yet fluid choreography, to the use of light and color renders it stunning in the moment, with a twinge that comes after when the rush of the performance ends and its embedded barbs linger. That's the sense of Sally and Brian's story as well, a pair of individuals who take each other to different places, who find peace and solace and even joy for a time, but who feel the lingering scars, and see the pain on the horizon.
Sally and Brian are Berlin in the movie, enjoying the present and trying to look away from what the future holds. As the film ends, and that slanted reflection shows more and more Nazi armbands in the audience, in the society that needs a cabaret to forget about what's coming, that current of horror that lurks beneath the joy and happiness and bombast on the stage makes it all the more salient, as much now as it did when the haunting spectre of World War II was only a generation ago. Cabaret is a feast for the eyes and ears, that harbors a looming sense of dread for both a country and couple, even as it revels in their excitement and affection as they stand, with their hearts full, drinking in life and love.
I've seen this movie 3 times now and have a ticket purchased for Wednesday night again in the Dome. I LOVE IT. Favorite movie of the year and well on it's way to one of my faves of all time. The music wonderful, the cinematography is gorgeous, the script is hilarious and everything just keeps moving. I love every single scene. I think it has the chance to be the fourth movie ever to win Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actress and Actor. Man, is this amazing!!!! See immediately then buy the soundtrack!!!!
UPDATE: Saw it for the 6th time yesterday at the Chinese Theater in IMAX. I. Still. Love. This. Movie. !!!!!!
UPDATE: Took my fam to see it the other night for #7. Still great!
UPDATE: Saw this last night at the Hollywood Bowl, making it my 8th time on the big screen. And I gotta say, my friend and I had an epic epic nightmare of a battle making it to the show and we were 20 minutes into movie when we got there but this movie is so special and spectacular it got us out of our funk instantly. Love it! Then I went home and watched it on blu-ray to hear the commentary man oh man I love this movie. Okay done with updates now that it's on home vid.
I don't think I have ever been in love with a movie, like I'm in love with La La Land. From the first few seconds, till the very end. This movie had me and didn't let go. My english vocabulary is not good enough to express my love, heck, my dutch vocabulary is not good enough to express it. This movie is everything.
It is beautiful, happy, magical, romantic and I could go on for a little while longer but I won't. I wasn't expecting it to be this musical-y, but I mean, I love musicals so I'm not complaining. I think this is a great "musical" because there isn't non stop singing, so people who don't like musicals might like this one because it's more "subtle". I can only imagine how much practice went into all those dance routines and don't get me started on the impressive piano skills Ryan Gosling showed us.
Something that really impressed me as well was the way they filmed everything. It's a very creative and different way, which I really enjoyed and think makes this movie a great inspiration for those who love film and camerawork themselves. The build up and flashbacks and stuff were really cool as well. Yea I really enjoyed that. Also, the storyline, which does so much for a movie, was so great.
This is normally the part were I talk about the actors, but seeing that there were mainly only two actors and they were both amazing (I do think tho, that Ryan Gosling his character wasn't a very challenging one for him because we have seen him in roles like these before. Mixing it up with all the dancing, singing en piano playing though, you got something quite different and I loved it), I'm going to skip this part and say that you should watch this movie, do nothing more, just watch it, enjoyed it and love it.
9.5/10. There are times when I feel jaded as a viewer. When it seems like despite the breadth of films out there, that I know most of the tricks, to where while I can appreciate a film's achievements in sort of a detached way, when I can even be engaged and invested in something, it doesn't necessarily reach me in the way that movies did when I first started watching them. The scope of appreciation has widened, but the emotional resonance feels muted, because I can't help but see the strings.
And then a film like Room comes along.
And Jack sees the expanse of sky for the first time. And Joy hugs her parents after not seeing them for seven years. And Robert can't even look at his grandson. And Nancy tells her daughter that she's not the only one whose life was destroyed. And Joy tells her mother that if she hadn't been taught to be nice, she might never have gone with Nick. And there's a supreme, heartbreaking look of guilt on her face when a reporter asks if she should have given her son up while in captivity. And Jack walks in on his mother's suicide attempt. And Nancy hears her grandson say "I love you." And Jack sees a real live dog, and makes a real live friend, and cuts his hair to give his mother his strength.
And I wince and I laugh and I cry and I gasp at this beautiful, devastating, intimate, life-affirming film. This is why we make movies. I love popcorn films, with the fights and flashes and epic feel, and I love the big dramas, with their scope and their sense of grandness and the talent on display, and I love those classic film comedies that mix the absurd and the irreverent and the memorable into a single hilarious package. But the films like Room simultaneously so small and so personal, yet so powerful and affecting, have a special place. These are, as Robert Ebert once put it, the empathy machine that is film working at peak efficiency, taking us into the lives of people who have suffered and been unfathomably wronged, and carries us with them as they carve out a way forward.
I didn't know I wanted a film that feels like a cross between Oldboy, Life Is Beautiful, and Boyhood, and yet the elements Room shares with each--the sense of isolation, the loving way in which a parent tries to distract their child from a continuing tragedy, the slice-of-life, impressionistic depiction of a young boy's innocence--come together to form something absolutely tremendous.
That last facet of the film, the fact that it filters the entire experience through young Jack's eyes, is a stroke of brilliance. There's a matter of factness, a certain directness or even blitheness to the way children experience the world. Using Jack as the lens through which Room tells its story renders those events not only realer, but plainer, imbuing them with the unvarnished perception of childhood. The way the film is able to get into Jack's head, to allow the audience to view these horrors and steps to recovery through his eyes, is its greatest strength and most impressive achievement.
By the same token, Brie Larson as Joy deserves all the accolades she's received for her performance here. While still a prisoner, she carries herself with such an air of both utter resignation and quiet resolve, someone who's been beaten into submission but carries on with whatever she has left. And once she returns home, the guilt that consumes her, the anger that she has for the world that kept turning without her, are palpable in every moment without fading into overwroughtness.
The film can essentially be divided into those two halves. The first is the story of Jack and Joy in Room, of the way that Joy makes unbearable circumstances livable for her son, the way that she copes and shields Jack from the horror around him, and how Jack strains and struggles to understand the idea of the world beyond those four walls, to where he can, eventually, help the two of them escape. The second half is far less intense, but still endlessly intriguing and affecting. It's a quiet domestic story about how people recover from that sort of trauma, both Joy who feels the opposite of survivor's guilt and second guesses herself, and Jack who is exposed to a big scary world, the depth and breadth of which is entirely alien to him.
But throughout both halves, there is such a pure emotional truth in each moment, from the simple joys that Jack enjoys within the home he doesn't realize is a prison, to his anger and resistance at having that fantasy shattered, to Joy's dispirited but resolute attempts to keep him happy and healthy, to the realistic, painful difficulties parents and children face when rebuilding a family seven years after a tragedy, to the wonder and fear a small boy has for what lies beyond the garden gate, and the unmitigated joy at every step taken toward some cobbled-together normalcy. Room is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, intensely personal film, that takes an unflinching yet uplifting look at how people cope and come back from the worst that our world has to offer.
The whole theatre burst into spontaneous cheers several times, and the whole theatre completely went silent - people literally stopped chewing their popcorn - on numerous occasions.
Like you've probably already heard, the movie REALLY is a phenomenal throwback to the original trilogy, with an extra oomph and insane amounts of creativity and new found inspiration that will take the franchise to a whole new level.
The characters are three-dimensional, it's nowhere near as strictly black and white, good vs. evil like in most of the previous movies, and Adam Driver as Kylo Ren is the best example of that. Hands down, the best villian to appear in the Star Wars franchise other than Darth Vader.
Daisy Ridley & John Boyega are thrilling to watch, the old cast members, popping in during the movie were just as fun to watch.
J.J. Abrams and the writers somehow managed to create a plot that was very confined in space and time, yet they effortlessly captured the grand universe that is Star Wars with some pretty great throwbacks to the old trilogy plot-wise. Some might argue that it's lack of creativity and unnecessary repetition, but I thought it was a wonderful homage. It flowed naturally and there really was no dull moment.
Absolutely phenomenal. :)
