Now that Bradley Cooper's terrible biopic of Leonard Bernstein Maestro has dropped onto Netflix it's time to revisit my review of the movie that originally dropped back when the movie played briefly in theaters -- if you missed it read it here. I uhhhhhh am not a fan.
"Maestro is a movie about acting, not music—it’s a movie about Bradley Cooper acting, specifically. Or less a movie than an excuse."
That said there are worse ways to spend two hours of one's life -- the movie is gorgeously lensed and Carey Mulligan is solid and Matt Bomer momentarily shows his butt. Bomer doesn't have much else to do but given how uninterested in Bernstein's gay experiences the movie is except to make Mulligan cry we'll take some butt. And also these nice photos of Matty in the NYT -- you can read the chat with him here. It's a nice one. And now over the holidays I pinky-swear I will fiiiiiinally watch Fellow Travelers...
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Apparently, the scene where Hawk hungrily links Tim's armpit was Bomer's idea. He knows his audience.
@ Jason
You'll probably end up hating everything except the sex scenes, which are groundbreaking (for lack of a better word) for mainstream TV.
The thing about Maestro is, first of all, the music is glorious. Secondly, however, the story has no real chronology. So many people important to his life are mere caricatures instead of real people: Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Jerry Robbins, Aaron Copland, etc. Third: Why are we hearing passages from the Mass midway through the story? It was, frankly, his last great triumph, written for the opening of the Kennedy Center. The story of the marriage is interesting, and Cooper captures Bernstein's look and voice, but the scenes are hollow. The entire thing rings false.
I would have loved to see more scenes devoted to the creation of Fancy Free, On the Town, West Side Story and Candide. How about something about the doomed collaboration of Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner which resulted only in a suite from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. How about a scene of him leading the orchestra while scoring On the Waterfront.
There's been a lot of hoopla about this movie, but I can't say I'm overly impressed with it.
I enjoyed it nothing groundbreaking but both Leads are superb.
Rest assured, Jason: Fellow Travelers not only has a bunch of gay content but also a very nice close-up of Bomer's bare backside (say that three times fast).
Haven't read the book, but Bomer and Bailey's Fellow Travelers is kind of hard to watch. The docudrama of McCarthy and Cohen's disgusting witch hunt was sort of new to me, as exposited in the series, though Angels In America covered some of that ground from a different angle, and a lot else, 25 years ago. The Normal Heart, likewise, I think already covered much of the rest of it. And I'm still trying to figure out if the specific stories of Hawk & Tim are compelling. With actors as beautiful as Bomer and Bailey playing them, it's kind of distracting though I think their performances are both excellent. The sex scenes are so brief that I really need to watch it a second time, but I'm not sure I'm looking forward to it because pretty much all of the rest of it was just painful to watch. And the McCarthy episodes are doubly disconcerting because watching them I worry that some of my relatives probably voted for the fucker. Looking forward to Jason's review which might explain what it's really about.
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