- The movie opens with poor creatively exhausted Guido Contini whining about how movies are dreams in your mind that die when you actually try to film them. He’s talking about the creative process itself being what kills most art and how on rare occasions you can get it back in a few rare instances. I thought this was a particularly apt description of how this movie was going to play out and I was not wrong.
- How did this win several Tony awards as a Broadway musical? The songs are terrible. TERRIBLE. The only remotely enjoyable song is the overplayed “Be Italian” from the trailer, and reached an ultimate low with Marion Cotillard’s unfortunate solo on the ridiculous “My Husband Makes Movies” (yes, that is seriously the first line in the song). Kate Hudson’s “Cinema Italiano” was basically a shopping list of stylish fashion goods and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t sound out of place on a Nelly album. The songs were too few and far between and every musical sequence felt like the words were being made up on the spot (and not in a good spontaneous way).
- This movie looks like a Christina Aguilera music video circa 2001. What are probably high production values on a video are incredibly low tech on an actual movie.
- Rob Marshall needs to learn how to make movie without relying on conventional shots of sound stages as if he was recording a bland theatre production to be released as a free DVD for donation of $120 to PBS during their annual membership drive. We get it. You worked on Broadway. Try making a movie now.
- I’ve seen all these costumes before in movies from earlier this decade. Recycling: it’s not always the best idea. If we’re going to go the “all women are strippers or mothers” route, could we at least spring for some original costumes? Colour me unimpressed.
- Daniel Day-Lewis sounds like Count von Count when he sings with his fake Italian accent. That’s one, one reason not to see this movie! Much as I love him, I don’t get overly excited about schleppy creative geniuses who can be assholes and not bathe and yet still have an adoring public and receive funding for scriptless films. Guido would be a critique on the film industry if the movie actually condemned rather than celebrated him.
- You know how various actors and singers are always guest performing with the Pussycat Dolls for no apparent reason? The casting of the women in this movie feels like this, i.e. everyone apparently feels the need to, at some point in their lives, play a stripper in a way that is evidently socially acceptable. The costumes (as repetitive as they are) seem like the only reason anyone would bother being in this movie. Marion Cotillard was the only one who seemed to bring any life to her character, possibly because she’s the only one who got more than one song and, more importantly, the only one who ever got to sing outside the context of Guido’s fantasies.
- Fergie’s “Be Italian” sequence was actually the only one I liked. We decided that she was a beach strega, strega being Italian for witch and strega being one of our favourite words lately. She was essentially a highly sexualized Jenny Greenteeth, who I didn’t realise was part of English folklore until finding that link right now. We also admired the tambourine-and-sand choreography because, well, who doesn’t?
- Please tell me Sophia Loren is doing public service announcements about the dangers of tanning.
- If Glee has taught me one thing (and I’m pretty sure there are very few life lessons that can be gleaned from that show), it’s that the presence of hairography disguises mediocre talent. There was much hairography to be had in this movie, so that should explain a lot.
- This movie has absolutely no plot aside from “Guido can’t write his script”. The women in the movie are all demons who have tortured — and I use that word in the context of Guido’s imagined reality and not actual reality — him one way or another in his real life so he plays out elaborate fantasy sequences in his head to deal with the different facets of his stunted creativity. Essentially, this movie is Where The Wild Things Are on copious amounts of crack, glitter, and lace but without any idea of how to deal with genuine fragmented emotion. Guido’s seamstress, Lilli, eventually tells him that the reason his films are good is because he never stopped being a child; the problem here is that, unlike our hero Max in the wolf costume, Guido is an effing adult and should act like one. Ugh. Petulant artists. People shouldn’t enable guys like this.
- I would have probably enjoyed this a hell of a lot more if I was still 18, had just discovered post-modernism, and hadn’t already been inundated with stuff like this in pop-culture for the past decade.
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The fact that you’ve managed to equate this movie with the Pussycat Dolls is even more of an incentive to avoid it.