Maestro

No review content available.

15 minutes into the movie I was wondering what was the point of this movie? It is not even your regular wikipedia to screen Oscar bait biopic. It is bombarded with dialogue and most of them add nothing to do the plot (if there was one). The prosthetics and over acting performances from Bradley and Carey were so painful and cringe inducing to watch. A movie with a stellar cast and technicians yet the output is something so painfully bad. Could someone tell Bradley he doesn't need to explain everything and can actually show us what's happening. The entire 120 minutes felt more like a podcast with annoying fake accents rather than a feature film. Leonard Bernstein is regarded as a genius and one of the greatest composers to exist but this movie was nothing about it. It was a dull unemotional Marriage Story where people keep talking and talking about the most mundane aspects of life. The use of music is comically bad, for a movie about a composer, not a single piece of music sticks with you. Bradley uses the most original idea to drift between timelines - B&W for past and color for original (The creativity!). Club this along with Theory of Everything, Eyes of Tammy Faye, Judy, Bohemian Rhapsody, The King's Speech, and The Darkest Hour in "Please Give me an Oscar, I am doing acting with 10 KGs of prosthetics on my face and faking a foreign accent" sub-genre.

Yes, good acting, great music but absolutely no story. At all. Apart from his bisexuality which dominated the script. Bradley Cooper was too greedy in writing, directing and starring. What did he write? Not much of a story. I'd like to have seen Lenny's childhood explicated, more meat on the bare bones offered here. Also, why so little on West Side Story - one brief extract and not the huge explosive hit it was at the time. The adulation which followed. The teasing bits of his Missa were beautiful and far too much of his Mahler, though lovely, had little bearing on the overall story. Brad's prosthetic nose was distracting in that it gave a nasal whiny tone to his dialogue. And he might have done better with another actor. Carey Mulligan, as always was amazing in her role but again, underplayed the distress she must have felt at his infidelity/. At one point he left her for a young (male) lover and only returned when she was diagnosed with cancer. (in her breast, from a broken heart? Who knows) The great man of music was not served well here, far too shallow a treatment of his genius. 5/10.

The acting is superb and particularly Carey Mulligan who is astonishing, as usual, and Bradley Cooper's transformation is incredible. The look and feel throughout is very polished. But, and this isn't a minor quibble -- I found it really hard to understand the dialogue! Characters speak so quickly, in a mumble, that I actually considered putting on subtitles. Anyway, it wouldn't have made a difference, I thought the movie was so empty and plotless and uninteresting. There was really no tension in the wife's dealing with her husband's bisexuality, no real exploration or understanding of Bernstein's conflicts, and no delving into his achievements or their context, so there wasn't much left!