I enjoyed it, and thought Carey Mulligan was especially fine. Between this and her brief turn in Saltburn where she almost steals the movie away from the leads (“Daddy always said I’d end up at the bottom of the Thames”) she’s having a great year.
As Roy points out it’s refreshing to not have a biopic hit all the “big” events. Movies should not be history lessons, after all. Nobody’s getting quizzed as they walk out of the theater. I did find the relationship a little maddening, as I’ve never had much patience with the “artistic temperament” excuse offered to defend people who behave like toddlers while hurting those closest to them. But again, Mulligan is superb as she moves from initially accepting a glass-half-full arrangement, then to a kind of “la-la-la I see nothing” stoicism, and finally to a barbed resentment as she cracks under the pressure of the trade-off.
"I’ve never had much patience with the 'artistic temperament' excuse" -- I don't think Cooper does, either. I didn't come away from it thinking it was all worth it to get Trouble in Tahiti. In fact I felt a great wish that Lenny and Felicia could have been obscure and happy.
Yeah, I don't think Cooper was defending Bernstein. I just found some of the self-indulgent behavior of Bernstein himself as depicted to be off-putting. And of course their marriage existed during the period when a lot of people within their circle would have held the opinion, "well, he *IS* Leonard Bernstein, so there's that." There's somewhat less tolerance for Wayward Genius behavior today, I think.
Precisely. At the time, the creme de la creme of bohemian artists had more in common with Tammy Wynette's audience than they likely would have been comfortable acknowledging.
This sounds good. I cannot stand biopics for all the reasons Roy lays out here. Years ago, I was in the theater watching the Johnny Cash movie (my partner wanted to see it, her beloved uncles were huge Cash fans), and halfway through I thought to myself "Why the fuck am I watching this?" That was my revelation. Smacked me in the head with the fact that I do not like biopics. Recently saw Oppenheimer and for all its masterfully done beauty (and...'Acting!'..), I just couldn't wait until it was over. It's a "me" thing, not bashing any particular film.
of the standard " Boy Howdy, this film blew goats" kind of film reviews in the Edroso canon. Those can be fun to read but I'm not sure they're really helpful. I don't exactly buy the auteur premise that you really need a Raoul Walsh fanboy to write about a Raoul Walsh film but I think it always helps when the critic knows something about the filmmaker It isn't just looking for targets.
Not sure where I'm going with this - The lady in charge of production called me up about 6:15 and said" You need to come down here and eat half of this gummy" I said"Why don't you just save it for later?"
She said"I have no willpower. If I eat half now the other half will be gone by 6:45 "
Well, it's important to help your friends so I went down to help her out. It was one of those sativa things and by 7:00 a.m. the really great ideas we're coming at a rate of one every 10 or 12 minutes. So once again , here I am with a head full of ideas that are driving me insane. Just another Monday.
So yeah, I'm not a Bernstein fan but I am a Bradley Cooper fan so I will probably give this a try.
I love your posts, but I cannot fathom what your work environment and work process must be like. If I indulged in cannabis at work, not only would it not spur my creativity, but I would likely spend several hours staring at a ficus plant while pondering the mysteries of life, and after paranoia had passed enough for me to be in the presence of other people, I would head out for a banana split. In other words, no creativity and certainly no useable ideas would be inspired, lmao.
You are my twin who writes way better. I don’t know what the newfangled cannabis delivery systems are like, I just remember the olden days and the paranoia (it strikes deep /into your heart it can creep).
Hey Roy - did Bradley need the fake nose? I suspect he’d have done fine without it. Was it distracting at all?
I get paid to stare at the ficus and think deep thoughts. Actually, I am the intermediary between the ficus and our world. That's really not too far off.
A lot of what I do is inspection and that's a key part of the nursery business. Say I have 12,000 lilac plants growing on a 20 by 120 ft table. We just treated these with a fungicide and a plant growth regulator to make them drop their leaves. I'm going to need to do a close inspection to determine if our treatments are working.
Out of those 12,000 plants, I'm going to need to examine 15% to 20% (16 to 1800 or so ) to be sure. That head space is a lot easier for me to find sometimes with a buzz.
Monday is usually not the wake and bake day. A lot of things happen first thing Monday morning. I can be tempted though and like I said I was just trying to help somebody out.
I do a lot of technical writing and I stay pretty straight for that. And I'm not senior management but I'm one of the people that senior management depends on to keep them informed so I am pretty frequently on calls to every swinging dick in the company. That can get a little weird.
I agree that it was wise to choose one aspect of his life (his primary relationship) as the meat of the movie. But still too much exposition up front for my taste. I wonder if it came from market research that showed today’s movie goers largely don’t know who he is? Even so, a good movie could be made about a famous and accomplished man (take our word for it) who had this complicated marriage. Carey Mulligan was great, as always.
Best review I’ve seen! Thank you. It was a real movie— entertaining, takes you out of your life, delicately makes you sift through your priors, wows the eyes… my only quibble is that the title is misleading. It’s about them and it not him. The black and white segment is soooo silvery you fully understand the phrase “silver screen”. I was lucky enough to see it at the Paris in NYC and it was dazzling.
You are lucky! And yes, the photography is dazzling. I loved two key scenes played in medium-long and (obscured!) long shot, respectively. And a scene where the drapes in their apartment predominate. Some great framing in the picture.
I haven't watched this, but I'm glad that since he did orchestral music, the movie won't be obligated to include the part where our hero stumbles upon or otherwise suddenly blurts out their most famous lyric for the first time and I choke from hilarity/embarrassment.
So disappointed this never made it into a movie bio, but the story goes that Rogers and Hammerstein, writing The Sound of Music and needing a fake lyric to get My Favorite Things to scan right, picked "Cute little babies who fall off of swings."
I love this idea, take one aspect of a famous person's life and make a good movie about that, don't worry you're not covering everything (if people want to know it all about Bernstein, that can go read a damn book.) Hope it catches on.
So, in the same spirit, I've just finished a biography of Louis Armstrong from which I learned that the guy was a YUUUGE pothead. Smoked it daily from the 1920's right up to his death. Those famous 1920's recordings with the Hot Five, not only was Louis high as the International Space Station, he required every other musician to be high as well.
Armstrong was married four times, his relationship with women could best be described as "Always have few on the side." But with his one enduring love, Mary Jane, that was til-death-do-us-part.
So anyway, a modest proposal if you're listening, Hollywood: Satchmo and Weed: A Love Story.
He also had a very open and enthusiastic relationship with a brand of laxative called Swiss Kriss, I'm thinking that's something we can skip over in the movie treatment.
There's a climactic argument in which she says, of his music, not so much that he shares it with us or gives it to us as "you throw it in our face!" That's fascinating, and I wish there had been more to support this idea: That. per a stereotype, a gay man *feels* more than a conventionally straight person, so Bernstein is saying, "My nature is illegal and immoral to you, but here's what it enables me to do."
Yeah, that was the "here's what this movie is about" speech most biopics resort to. I got more that it was all about Lenny *showing* his feels more than a conventionally straight man. That and all of the focus on being "true to himself" let him ignore what doing that did to the woman he supposedly loved. Of course he was worshipped, almost literally, for showing those feels in his performances, so it was almost inevitable he'd see that as permission to extend that to his entire life.
Somewhere, an AI is scrapin' the internet at the request of a student who needs to write a term paper about "What was that Bernstein movie all about" so it's nice of us humans to put it right there in the script.
Another nail hit right on the head, IMHO. They didn't indulge in the "famous people in their scuffling days" as much as they could have, though I was impressed they might think a contemporary audience would remember Condon and Green, let alone recognize them. They did manage to wedge in the REM song that name checked Bernstein. Cooper must have understood that a contemporary audience wouldn't grasp or care about how big Berstein was back in the day when the general public actually knew and cared about some classical musicians, and a doomed love story was the only hook that made sense or was worth filming. I only noticed The Nose because of the controversy over it. Any publicity is good publicity, as Yogi Berra once said.
Haven't seen the above film, BUT I did have Movie Night last night - Something Funny Happened On The Way To The Forum, The Wrong Box, and Putney Swope, along with purchasing The Andromeda Strain, which I shall watch tonight if I get home at a decent hour. The first two I enjoyed immensely and had forgotten how goddamn FUNNY they are and how well casted. Swope is way better than I remembered, and I understood a lot more of the jokes than I did when I originally saw it. Hopefully Andromeda holds up as well as these three did.
Andromeda Strain is one of my favorites, although not a lot of jokes, I'd say. That final sequence gets me every damn time, no matter how many times I've seen it. I can't think of anything else that comes close to it for suspense.
I've now got Twilight's Last Gleaming, The Curse of the Demon, and Seven Days In May on my queue, but THAT is a good recommendation, thanks! Been a long time since I've watched Colossus.
Maybe would love to see a take on the Panthers and the “Radical Chic” mini-scandal.
Or maybe, in reality, the media made it seem much bigger than it was to the Bernsteins?
Well, someone else is going to have to make that movie.
Would need more 'there' there, I think. Maybe come from the angle of the mau maus, not the Great White Hunters...
Don't give Charlie Kirk or Dinesh D'Souza any more bad ideas.
Word.
Fret not. They are already o'erburdened with their own.
I wandered, lonely as a thought in Charlie Kirk's head...
POPS! Come BACK!!
For sure. I was thinking Maestro 2. Not that anyone would make it such that it would be worth watching.
Thanks for the reviews. It’s like no one else writes them like they used to…
Maestro 2: Mau Mau-ing The Flak Catchers Boogaloo
(PS: rereading Tom Wolfe about this and it's clear that he *hates* the people he's writing about. In a waspish, ultra-WASP-ish way.)
Wolfe was such a great writer that he was able to cover up his contempt for, like, everyone, everything he covered.
As for Maestro 2, I was thinking similar but a variation too vulgar for me. I know.
Lips, sealed.
I enjoyed it, and thought Carey Mulligan was especially fine. Between this and her brief turn in Saltburn where she almost steals the movie away from the leads (“Daddy always said I’d end up at the bottom of the Thames”) she’s having a great year.
As Roy points out it’s refreshing to not have a biopic hit all the “big” events. Movies should not be history lessons, after all. Nobody’s getting quizzed as they walk out of the theater. I did find the relationship a little maddening, as I’ve never had much patience with the “artistic temperament” excuse offered to defend people who behave like toddlers while hurting those closest to them. But again, Mulligan is superb as she moves from initially accepting a glass-half-full arrangement, then to a kind of “la-la-la I see nothing” stoicism, and finally to a barbed resentment as she cracks under the pressure of the trade-off.
"I’ve never had much patience with the 'artistic temperament' excuse" -- I don't think Cooper does, either. I didn't come away from it thinking it was all worth it to get Trouble in Tahiti. In fact I felt a great wish that Lenny and Felicia could have been obscure and happy.
Yeah, I don't think Cooper was defending Bernstein. I just found some of the self-indulgent behavior of Bernstein himself as depicted to be off-putting. And of course their marriage existed during the period when a lot of people within their circle would have held the opinion, "well, he *IS* Leonard Bernstein, so there's that." There's somewhat less tolerance for Wayward Genius behavior today, I think.
Emphasis on 'somewhat'.
Emphasis, italics, quotation marks, and bold print, lol.
Stable Genius seems to get quite a lot of toleration from SOME people.
Or, hey, “he is a man, and women are meant to be long-suffering, so...”
Precisely. At the time, the creme de la creme of bohemian artists had more in common with Tammy Wynette's audience than they likely would have been comfortable acknowledging.
This sounds good. I cannot stand biopics for all the reasons Roy lays out here. Years ago, I was in the theater watching the Johnny Cash movie (my partner wanted to see it, her beloved uncles were huge Cash fans), and halfway through I thought to myself "Why the fuck am I watching this?" That was my revelation. Smacked me in the head with the fact that I do not like biopics. Recently saw Oppenheimer and for all its masterfully done beauty (and...'Acting!'..), I just couldn't wait until it was over. It's a "me" thing, not bashing any particular film.
Another fine review.
You know, I don't recall many ( if any !)
of the standard " Boy Howdy, this film blew goats" kind of film reviews in the Edroso canon. Those can be fun to read but I'm not sure they're really helpful. I don't exactly buy the auteur premise that you really need a Raoul Walsh fanboy to write about a Raoul Walsh film but I think it always helps when the critic knows something about the filmmaker It isn't just looking for targets.
Not sure where I'm going with this - The lady in charge of production called me up about 6:15 and said" You need to come down here and eat half of this gummy" I said"Why don't you just save it for later?"
She said"I have no willpower. If I eat half now the other half will be gone by 6:45 "
Well, it's important to help your friends so I went down to help her out. It was one of those sativa things and by 7:00 a.m. the really great ideas we're coming at a rate of one every 10 or 12 minutes. So once again , here I am with a head full of ideas that are driving me insane. Just another Monday.
So yeah, I'm not a Bernstein fan but I am a Bradley Cooper fan so I will probably give this a try.
The power of positive chemicals.
I got a meeting at 10:00. On my schedule, under "topic" , I wrote"Plants"
That's a pretty broad topic here in the nursery. My plan is to keep my mouth shut, tiltmy head and nod, sagely, occasionally.
Sage is a plant, so there ya go.
The thyme just flies by as you're nodding sagely.
"Say, does anyone else notice that scent...? Kinda like...prairie..."
[Leaning forward, elbows on table, hands clasped, fingers pointing up and resting gently against pursed lips, nodding ever-so-slightly]
"The lady in charge of production called me up about 6:15 and said 'You need to come down here and eat half of this gummy'" wonderful life you live.
I love your posts, but I cannot fathom what your work environment and work process must be like. If I indulged in cannabis at work, not only would it not spur my creativity, but I would likely spend several hours staring at a ficus plant while pondering the mysteries of life, and after paranoia had passed enough for me to be in the presence of other people, I would head out for a banana split. In other words, no creativity and certainly no useable ideas would be inspired, lmao.
You are my twin who writes way better. I don’t know what the newfangled cannabis delivery systems are like, I just remember the olden days and the paranoia (it strikes deep /into your heart it can creep).
Hey Roy - did Bradley need the fake nose? I suspect he’d have done fine without it. Was it distracting at all?
Thank you for the nice compliment and absolutely, cannabis for me is a combo pack of vegetative state/paranoia/sugar cravings.
And I found the fake nose distracting, too. He didn't need it, he had the voice and mannerisms down.
Not Roy but maybe because I don’t know Bradley Cooper I did not find The Nose at all distracting.
I forgot all about it
I didn’t find it distracting, but it was unnecessary and that annoys me.
Could be worse, could be Alec Guinness in Oliver.
I had to refresh my memory on that, and yikes!
And it was 1968!
I get paid to stare at the ficus and think deep thoughts. Actually, I am the intermediary between the ficus and our world. That's really not too far off.
A lot of what I do is inspection and that's a key part of the nursery business. Say I have 12,000 lilac plants growing on a 20 by 120 ft table. We just treated these with a fungicide and a plant growth regulator to make them drop their leaves. I'm going to need to do a close inspection to determine if our treatments are working.
Out of those 12,000 plants, I'm going to need to examine 15% to 20% (16 to 1800 or so ) to be sure. That head space is a lot easier for me to find sometimes with a buzz.
Monday is usually not the wake and bake day. A lot of things happen first thing Monday morning. I can be tempted though and like I said I was just trying to help somebody out.
I do a lot of technical writing and I stay pretty straight for that. And I'm not senior management but I'm one of the people that senior management depends on to keep them informed so I am pretty frequently on calls to every swinging dick in the company. That can get a little weird.
The Men (And Women) Who Stare At Ficus
And The Gummies They Share
If the ficus starts staring back, cut the gummies in half next time.
4 half-marks.
"I had a head full of ideas that were driving me insane, and a mouth full of... Cotton candy!" -- Nick Danger
I agree that it was wise to choose one aspect of his life (his primary relationship) as the meat of the movie. But still too much exposition up front for my taste. I wonder if it came from market research that showed today’s movie goers largely don’t know who he is? Even so, a good movie could be made about a famous and accomplished man (take our word for it) who had this complicated marriage. Carey Mulligan was great, as always.
Best review I’ve seen! Thank you. It was a real movie— entertaining, takes you out of your life, delicately makes you sift through your priors, wows the eyes… my only quibble is that the title is misleading. It’s about them and it not him. The black and white segment is soooo silvery you fully understand the phrase “silver screen”. I was lucky enough to see it at the Paris in NYC and it was dazzling.
You are lucky! And yes, the photography is dazzling. I loved two key scenes played in medium-long and (obscured!) long shot, respectively. And a scene where the drapes in their apartment predominate. Some great framing in the picture.
I haven't watched this, but I'm glad that since he did orchestral music, the movie won't be obligated to include the part where our hero stumbles upon or otherwise suddenly blurts out their most famous lyric for the first time and I choke from hilarity/embarrassment.
So disappointed this never made it into a movie bio, but the story goes that Rogers and Hammerstein, writing The Sound of Music and needing a fake lyric to get My Favorite Things to scan right, picked "Cute little babies who fall off of swings."
I love this idea, take one aspect of a famous person's life and make a good movie about that, don't worry you're not covering everything (if people want to know it all about Bernstein, that can go read a damn book.) Hope it catches on.
So, in the same spirit, I've just finished a biography of Louis Armstrong from which I learned that the guy was a YUUUGE pothead. Smoked it daily from the 1920's right up to his death. Those famous 1920's recordings with the Hot Five, not only was Louis high as the International Space Station, he required every other musician to be high as well.
Armstrong was married four times, his relationship with women could best be described as "Always have few on the side." But with his one enduring love, Mary Jane, that was til-death-do-us-part.
So anyway, a modest proposal if you're listening, Hollywood: Satchmo and Weed: A Love Story.
He also had a very open and enthusiastic relationship with a brand of laxative called Swiss Kriss, I'm thinking that's something we can skip over in the movie treatment.
Louis was famous for needing lots of arrangements when he was traveling with his band.
Mezz Mezzrow provided them.
Yes, very well-known "arranger."
As a Bluesman, Jazz Division, Louis would have considered it part of the job description to "have a few on the side". Check out B.B. King's biography.
There's a climactic argument in which she says, of his music, not so much that he shares it with us or gives it to us as "you throw it in our face!" That's fascinating, and I wish there had been more to support this idea: That. per a stereotype, a gay man *feels* more than a conventionally straight person, so Bernstein is saying, "My nature is illegal and immoral to you, but here's what it enables me to do."
Huh. Will contemplate. Thanks.
Yeah, that was the "here's what this movie is about" speech most biopics resort to. I got more that it was all about Lenny *showing* his feels more than a conventionally straight man. That and all of the focus on being "true to himself" let him ignore what doing that did to the woman he supposedly loved. Of course he was worshipped, almost literally, for showing those feels in his performances, so it was almost inevitable he'd see that as permission to extend that to his entire life.
Somewhere, an AI is scrapin' the internet at the request of a student who needs to write a term paper about "What was that Bernstein movie all about" so it's nice of us humans to put it right there in the script.
Another nail hit right on the head, IMHO. They didn't indulge in the "famous people in their scuffling days" as much as they could have, though I was impressed they might think a contemporary audience would remember Condon and Green, let alone recognize them. They did manage to wedge in the REM song that name checked Bernstein. Cooper must have understood that a contemporary audience wouldn't grasp or care about how big Berstein was back in the day when the general public actually knew and cared about some classical musicians, and a doomed love story was the only hook that made sense or was worth filming. I only noticed The Nose because of the controversy over it. Any publicity is good publicity, as Yogi Berra once said.
, famously...
Haven't seen the above film, BUT I did have Movie Night last night - Something Funny Happened On The Way To The Forum, The Wrong Box, and Putney Swope, along with purchasing The Andromeda Strain, which I shall watch tonight if I get home at a decent hour. The first two I enjoyed immensely and had forgotten how goddamn FUNNY they are and how well casted. Swope is way better than I remembered, and I understood a lot more of the jokes than I did when I originally saw it. Hopefully Andromeda holds up as well as these three did.
That's a great lineup!
Andromeda Strain is one of my favorites, although not a lot of jokes, I'd say. That final sequence gets me every damn time, no matter how many times I've seen it. I can't think of anything else that comes close to it for suspense.
Suggested pairing: Colossus: The Forbin Project
I've now got Twilight's Last Gleaming, The Curse of the Demon, and Seven Days In May on my queue, but THAT is a good recommendation, thanks! Been a long time since I've watched Colossus.
Lovely review!
In my culture there’s a saying...para los gustos se hicieron los colores.
I grew up watching Uncle Lenny on PBS. Then came the YouTube where I watched endless clips of him.
Maybe I just didn’t want to see the man behind the comforting presence that was teaching me about Mahler and Beethoven.