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I saw this last month and thought it was electric. It's actually an incredibly fun, entertaining epic with some awe-inspiring setpieces and great performances. The score is also the best of the year. The opening 35-minute party sequence trumps anything in Way of Water in my opinion. Definitely one of the year's best. A

Once Upon a Time in Tinseltown…

“Do you think people want sound in their pictures?”

Man has massive diarrhea in toilet stall…

Yes. People will want sound in their pictures.

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What the fuck happened? The first 90-120 minutes are near perfection. A movie made by movie nerds for film nerds (and admittedly, for no one else). Then for 45 minutes it becomes a rehash of Boogie Nights, but in 1932 and Tobey Maguire as Alfred Molina. And then the epilogue remembers it’s a movie about movies and features a montage that separate from the movie I’m sure could blow someone away, but in-movie feels like the hammiest attempt at a Best Picture Oscar since Green Book. The epilogue is kind of pathetic. Come to think of it, it feels like a montage you’d see on the Oscars about the power of “the movies”.

I know countless people have and will compare the movie as cocaine personified, but it’s pretty spot-on. It starts off great. Then it becomes annoying and eventually devolves into a nightmare you just want to escape from.

B

Yeah the ending felt weird to me (so bizarre to see that Hollywood momtage with the Matrix and Avatar lol)

I was pretty into it for most of the running time though. It's bizarre but I found myself invested in it.

Yeah bad editing on this one. Tightened up this could have been a quiet gem of a film.

My audience cheered for this at the end?

I thought it started with promise but all downhill in the last 1/3. It's almost like they made a movie around a party scene rather than a movie with a massive party scene.

Still had some nice elements but agree on that comment about editing, that's this film's biggest issue. It feels like they really didn't want to drop anything to the point its not coherant.

Also Tobey loses most of his Spidy goodwill here. I would be shocked if he doesn't win a Razzie for this it was so bad.

B-

In the moment I wasn't sure what to think of some parts, interchanging scenes and tones which I had all kinds of different feelings about, but then once it was over I was longing for more of it. On the one hand I felt that I wanted more depth from a certain character or aspect, but on the other hand it's like this great rollercoaster ride exactly as it should be. As an experience as a whole, mesmerizing is what describes it best for me. There's plenty to laud this for, setting, direction, art-direction, soundtrack and acting. Margot Robbie gives a great performance, it may not have been special in that it was pretty much constantly dialed up to 11, but I loved it. With being a film about film, I totally dug the story in general too.

A-

I can't really totally this because some scenes are so good in isolation like Nellie flopping her first sound movie or the the chaos of the big war movie shoot, and Robbie/Pitt/Calva are all excellent as is Tobey having fun, but ultimately it just doesn't come together as a full movie well. I heard one thing separates the best directors is they know when to cut a scene that's is good in a vacuum but doesn't make the movie better. This movie is 3 hours because it's full of scenes that are well shot by a director who knows all too well he has talent, but ultimately either don't need to be in it at all or could be way shorter, ultimately leaving it disjointed and losing one or two of its big three characters for long stretches of time. It might have worked if it went full vignette and just had a big ensemble of characters having little moments or subplots, but it still thinks it's telling three big stories with its main characters like Calva having this Jay Gatsby type arc of Nellie representing his Daisy like idealization and status above him, or Pitt's failure to transition to sound (for unexplained reasons), so it can't really claim to be a Hollywood snapshot either. The Oscars like movie montage at the end is as hamfisted an attempt to tell you the meaning of the movie as other moments in it like Calva and Nellie's early conversations about movies, Nellie telling Calva how they can't control her, or Jean Smart's big speech to Pitt about how he'll be remembered. And the story of silent actors struggling to transition to sound is hardly that new or interesting anyway compared to how transcendent the movie thinks it is, it's the most obvious move you can make for a movie about 1920s actors and it goes all in on it. Ultimately this so clearly needed more drafts and to be cut down to 2 and a half hours max.

Sadly the marketing for this film failed it, in my opinion. It was presented as basically one big party, but it's more than that. It's a look at the dynamics of the early film industry, the mechanics of it, and it also becomes rather poignant, and has lots of pizzazz along the way. It's a terrific film. It's not quite at the level of La La Land for me, but I still reward it high praise by summarizing it as 'The Artist meets Whiplash and The Great Gatsby'. It is, first and foremost, just a very gripping film. It held me from minute one, and it felt like a two hour film. It is deceptively epic, too. You know what to expect with Chazelle by now. Apart from First Man (don't know what happened there!) he delivers on-point musical composition twinned with lavish visuals, stylishly captured, and with absorbing narratives that - especially with this picture - should speak to every film fan in some way. What I specifically loved about it was how it gets over the fact that it's a film being made about films being made. I can't think of a perfect example right now, but films about films usually linger thinking their meta-approach is somehow novel and worthy of more of the film than it deserves.

Pitt is sensational. It started out and I thought that he would be the only good thing, but every plot and strand and character is of interest. Javier Bardem's story is drip fed throughout and by the end I was surprised how much I cared. The film is also surprisingly funny. It is also delightful to see Flea and Jeff Greene pop up in not-so-small roles.

There are a few things I can criticise, such as the inclusion of Avatar and T2, etc. clips at the end. I thought that was unneeded, and it cheapened the finale, in my opinion. The hitman not killing Bardem, and then Bardem running out without any blood on his face after being drenched in it while in the apartment ... I noticed it, so it irked me. But, you know, small things. Big picture? It is quite the achievement. In Chazelle we trust ... again.