jchapin-3
Joined Nov 2004
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jchapin-3's rating
Surprised that people feel this is a fitting homage to great prior musicals. Much as I LOVE Ryan Gosling and admire Emma Stone, they do not hold a candle stub to great dancers and singers like Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Judy Garland, John Travolta.
Both Gosling and Stone are adequate dancers, okay, but just not in the same class as the aforementioned. And both have embarrassingly weak voices...yes, sometimes their weaknesses border on the touching, but give me Ethel Merman, or Bing Crosby or Ethel Waters or Hoagy Carmichael. And if you like touchingly amateur song delivery, check out Toni Erdmann.
Add to their lack of musical talent and only adequate dancing the weak plot and the shallow characterizations and you might, like the three people I saw it with, emerge from the theater downcast and glum.
Both Gosling and Stone are adequate dancers, okay, but just not in the same class as the aforementioned. And both have embarrassingly weak voices...yes, sometimes their weaknesses border on the touching, but give me Ethel Merman, or Bing Crosby or Ethel Waters or Hoagy Carmichael. And if you like touchingly amateur song delivery, check out Toni Erdmann.
Add to their lack of musical talent and only adequate dancing the weak plot and the shallow characterizations and you might, like the three people I saw it with, emerge from the theater downcast and glum.
Loved it for about the first 30 minutes. The naiveté, the unabashed fulsomeness. The twee scenery, the coy looks. Even the charmingly tinny-to western ears - voices. Wonderful. But after another 20 minutes the singing sounded like screeching, the characters woes became drag-some, the protracted, but uncomplicated plot developments unbearably tedious. And all this went on for two hours. Ang Lee must have been crying for his delayed after -film dinner. I know I was, as was my companion and,it seemed, most of the sparse audience at the Walter Reade. I'm being told this comment is too short for submission but I've said what I want to say.
I found the film dreary. Slow paced between the action scenes, and the action usually pretty prosaic...though well-shot The usual flotillas of cop cars on the chase, the gun pursuits through city slums etc. Morgan Freeman had a glum life, downer life-style, but was too little of his life and charm was revealed to make us care. Brad Pitt was brash, and affectionate. Kevin Spacey was Kevin Spaceyily good. The murders seemed set-pieces of gruesomeness..unmoving - aside from the last - because there was no sense of the humanity of the victims. Good gruesomeness is possible - e.g The Silence of the Lambs, a brilliantly characterized film.