This is the only movie I’ve ever some across that it not available to stream anywhere. I literally had to buy the $10 DVD on Amazon. I only watched this movie because I found the idea of a Scorsese-directed “musical” intriguing. I put musical in quotation marks because upon watching, it wasn’t really a musical at all as advertised. There was like a 10 minute old timey musical sequence near the end of the almost three hour film and that’s it. I thought the story behind the making of this film was interesting. After the relatively good reception of Taxi Driver in ‘76, Scorsese decided to go the complete opposite direction in ‘77. And apparently he got so depressed after it failed at the box office that he almost lethally overdosed on cocaine and was inspired to make Raging Bull as his last attempt at American cinema. It definately seems as though there was a lot of cocaine involved in the making of this film. My biggest issue is that the scenes together do not form a whole. Each scene seems so disconnected from the last, and there is no sense of time passing whatsoever (sometimes that’s a good thing, but it didn’t work in the film). I genuinely don’t know if this movie took place over a week or a year. You have to make big logical jumps between how and why we got from the last scene to the current scene, which makes it hard to watch. It’s no surprise to me this movie as a commercial disaster. And the pacing is all over the place. Some scenes are action packed and some scenes are just closeups Liza Minnelli or De Niro staring into space for 30 seconds or more. Another issue in this film is that the main characters were so…. uninteresting. There’s nothing special, memorable, or likable about them. My biggest takeaways from this film were “ohhhh, so that’s where that Frank Sinatra song comes from” and that the story runs almost exactly parallel to La La Land. After realizing just how many older movies La La Land copied off of, you start to wonder if it was original at all. At its core, this film is a story about two artists who meet, struggle to achieve their dreams due to their relationship, ultimately choose to follow their dream, finally see each other again after a few years, and then go their separate ways again. La La Land really should have included the writers of this film in the credits. Same with King of Comedy in Joker. Is it just a trend to reinvent old box office bombs that become huge successes? I hope so. I’m not going to even start my rant about how very little (mainstream) films I see today have any originality but… it makes me angry. I like when movies take inspiration from older films—all directors do to some extent— but recently it just seems like some movies are straight up stealing entire plots. I can say with certainty that I won’t be using this in my auteur theory project because… it’s not present in this film. I would have absolutely no idea that this was a Scorsese movie. The camera movement and editing is very plain and the characters are barely explored. I don’t really know what the point of this film was. I thought it was entertaining enough, but I see where a lot of the dislike comes from.
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May Featured Movie QuoteBarry B. Benson: Yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black... Oh, black and yellow. Yeah, let's shake it up a little.
Yeah, I have letterboxd now
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