Mapa a las estrellas

By no stretch of the imagination do I think that this is a home run. Not at all. It's very messy, and many times each storyline strains to connect. However, there's still a sense of real fascination under it all. Messy, but also very interesting at times. If anything, the film would have worked more if the performances were more in-line with the obviously funny material at the core. The one actor to truly get it is Julianne Moore, who is easily the best performer here. She seems to have a helluva time, funny and wickedly offbeat, even if over-the-top in a way that works. She really does rise the film above what the script entails. Great performance

We used to expect gross-out horror from David Cronenberg. Now he gives us weird and weirder. MAPS TO THE STARS is set in a Tinseltown of designer homes, designer shops and exclusive restaurants. The background 'sheen' is reminiscent of an Almodovar movie, plus there's a Gothic element borrowed from Shyamalan (Agatha and Benjie see dead people). Julianne Moore's performance is in the kind of hyper-drive she brought to BOOGIE NIGHTS, which helps to power the movie's gearshift from Hollywood satire into violent melodrama. One of the themes is incest, which surely needed a deeper and subtler exploration.

Robert Pattinson takes another step away from the Twilight Zone in the role of a limo driver with screen writing aspirations (like every other chauffeur in Los Angeles). Cronenberg is clearly reaching out towards a more discerning class of viewer. MAPS TO THE STARS is very much an 'auteur' movie, highly intelligent and stylized, but perhaps perched uncomfortably between satire and psychodrama.

Hollywood never looks to kindly at itself when doing films about the lives of folks who make movies. But the Weiss family in Maps To The Stars are a really outstanding collection of freaks and weirdos.

Meet the Weisses. Father is John Cusack who is one of those self help promoting gurus making a fast buck on the lecture circuit and writing. His wife Olivia Williams is hardly a stay at home mom, she's out managing the career of their son Evan Bird who after time in a rehab is looking to make a comeback as a teen. That in itself is a sad new Hollywood tradition. From the time of Jackie Coogan child stars who emerge as chief breadwinners in their families have had unique and tragic stories. Bird gives his parents standing that they might never acquire on their own at the cost of a faintly normal childhood.

There's a fourth Weiss, another child played by Mia Wasikowska whose arrival by train sets the stage for the story. She's ordered a limousine and has the money to pay for it. Wasikowska chats up the driver, a hunky aspiring actor himself played by Robert Pattinson.

As the story unfolds we learn that Wasikowska has been living in Florida in an asylum, put there by her family after she set a fire. All this done with the prime object of keeping news of it away from the tabloid press. Can't have her brother's career and her father's racket be the subject of scandal.

Carrie Fisher makes a brief appearance as herself and Wasikowska has struck up a relationship with her via the Internet. Probably looking to palm off an eager, but obtrusive fan she suggest that actress Julianne Moore take her on as a 'personal assistant'.

Moore is a piece of work herself. She's a great lesson that Bird might not have the maturity to comprehend. It's the direction he's well on the way to. A totally self absorbed, self indulgent creature who thinks the whole world revolves around her. She's obsessed with playing her mother who was a great star who died in a fire like Linda Darnell back in the day. In her own imaginings she talks with her mother who puts her down for not having the talent to back up the ego.

Bird who is a Moore in training also has visions. His visitor is a little girl who was terminally ill whom he made a hospital visit for. No doubt he cheered her up in those last hours, but his psyche knows that maybe she sees him for what he is. Bird is also bright enough to see the path he's on, but can't do anything about it.

I suppose a certain amount of narcissism in show business is necessary to succeed. But Maps To The Stars is an ode to narcissism like I've never seen before on the big screen.

If I had to pick out someone who stood out in Maps To The Stars for me it's Evan Bird. I hope he's nothing like his character in the film in real life because anyone who's got to associate with him is in for one bumpy ride. But God only knows he's got any number of examples in real life to have studied for this role.

Another nasty bit of self analysis Maps To The Stars from Tinseltown.

You would think that the soap operatic sentiments (incest, famous mothers, mysterious personal assistants, haughty child stars, and more) of Maps to the Stars would give it an enjoyably melodramatic edge, but instead of being an absurdly funny Hollywood satire, it mopes along with writhing cynicism until characters begin to set themselves on fire and get bludgeoned to death. The characters are nasty, the story lines are nasty, and so are the expensive furnishings; you probably haven't seen a Tinsel Town film this contemptuous, but you certainly have had better times at the movies before. The cynicism of Maps to the Stars is notable, but it becomes so increasingly dark that it goes from bracingly edgy to staunchly depressing. You wouldn't expect anything different from the macabre adoring David Cronenberg, but there might be a part of you that wishes we were lurking in the shadow of the soul sister of The Player instead of Debbie Downer's.

David Lynch got his kicks destroying the lives of the characters Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring played in Mulholland Dr., and Cronenberg has no trouble poisoning the wells the people in Maps to the Stars drink from. The Weiss family, who mirror the shameful dysfunction of the Spears' or the Lohan's, have slithered their way into Hollywood, but the scraggly hole they snuck in through is rapidly closing. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) makes a living as a famed television psychiatrist with a starry clientèle, while his 13-year son (Evan Bird) is a successful child actor who headlines a shitty franchise when he's not residing in rehab. Christina, mother to Benjie and wife to Stafford, acts as her son's agent, clinging to his fame as she tries to find meaning in her empty, sad life.

Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), one of Stafford's many patients, is an aging, irrelevant actress whose entire career has been overshadowed by her legendary mother (Sarah Gadon), who prematurely died in a house fire in the 1970s. Making her way into town is the enigmatic Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a young woman with troubling burns on the side of her body; she finds a job as Havana's personal assistant, but her dangerous connection with the Weiss family leaves her slightly cursed.

If I've explained the plot well (and I probably haven't), then Maps to the Stars might sound enticing, carrying the same self-awareness of Twin Peaks while retaining the screeching satire of Sunset Boulevard. Wrong and wrong. I desperately wanted to like Maps to the Stars, (Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska are certainly two of Hollywood's most talented actresses and Cronenberg is a consistently interesting director), but it's much too unlikable to be anything other than dreary. The humor is sharp, but when humor is also underlined in a pen based in gloominess, it's hard to do anything other than remained sickened. The blame can't be placed on Cronenberg — his claustrophobic, fearlessly ghoulish filmmaking style is as fresh as ever — but on Wagner, whose screenplay wants to be sardonic but eventually runs out of ideas. The ending, which is essentially a series of disturbing character offings, seems like an act of haste instead of a necessity.

But if Maps to the Stars isn't as delicious as I wish it was, it never stops being watchable, in part to the cast (a round-table of fantastic performances) and in part to Cronenberg's unwaveringly creepy handling of it all. It isn't necessarily a horror film, but there's always a part of us that twitches in fear that something bad will happen. Bad stuff unavoidably does happen; I just wish the negativity was more creative. But if the woods are lovely, dark, and deep and you've got promises to maintain your derisive mood, Maps to the Stars might contain just enough pessimism to toot your raincloud drenched horn.

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Daivd Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' tells the convergent stories of several different characters in Hollywood: at first it appears as if this is one of those films about discrete lives that form a fine web of faint touches, but in fact it turns out that (most) of the characters have serious history, and are coming back together after events that have driven them apart. This reveal is quite well-plotted; the problem is that the characters are all mostly nasty (or at the very least weird), and moreover are so in a uniquely Hollywood way - you can believe there are such people in and around the movie business, but they're simply not the sort of people that most of us meet in our everyday lives. This makes it quite hard to sympathise with them, even if we can see the reason for their meanness and oddness. Cronenberg's movies can be considered cold in general, and although the charge isn't always justified, I watched this one very much from the outside. One thing it isn't, in spite of its billing as such, is a comedy.