This movie was physically painful to watch. Do not ask me what 97% of Rotten Tomatoes reviewers were thinking, as I have not one clue.
A smarmy actor schmoozes with crowds, tries to puppy-dog appease his injured wife, gets giddy over a leggy dancer, falls on hard times, gets back up.
This is a black-and-white movie, made as if it was made in 1927. If you want to see stuff like that, there are plenty of black-and-white movies that were made in 1927. The addition of color, sound, and so forth were a result of progress. At least it wasn’t done in 3D.
If you like the auto-homage directors like to do from time to time (as in Hugo, where Scorsese honors a pioneering filmmaker), you will like this one. We liked this movie so little, and found ourselves so uncomfortable, we left after about 20 minutes.
What I say is that if a movie cannot get my attention and interest in 20 minutes, I’m outta there.
“You should give it a chance!” you say, but I did give it a chance. I gave it a third of an hour and then, finding myself in agonies over this “Best Picture” (are you kidding me?), left.
It was a gift to the other audience members (all three of them) that we left. Pretty soon we would have been guffawing out loud, and that’s bad manners.
Speaking of the Best Picture Oscar…seriously? And the Best Actor Oscar…are you kidding me? And the Best Director Oscar…well, whatever. I do know people who loved this movie a lot, and maybe you will be among them.