Maestro
A typical Hollywood people biopic. Glosses over any professional drama, it’s purely about the personal relationships. As a melodrama, it lacks some grandiose and bombastic scenes, unlike the music, ironically.
Our hero is some rich guy surrounded by other Park Avenue aristos. In the beginning, there’s some minor references to WW2 and a guy recommending our hero change his name away from such Jewish marker as “Bernstein”. But there’s no drama, in the next scene he is already a superstar with a child.
His wife is really the most tragic character. After the honeymoon period, she is basically abandoned by her husband (endless affairs with dudes). She tries to get back at him by having flings of her own, but she always finds closeted gay men. The perils of her rarefied friend circle.
Alas, the main couple gets back together in tome for the third act, when she gets sick. His hubby does the right thing for once, and stays with her until the end. But his personality is larger than life, even after she dies he remains excited with music and penises.
Carey Mulligan is awesome in that Katherine Hepburn Atlantic accent. Bradley Cooper’s nose is somewhat distracting, but not as much as his uglified CGI face. Fret not, the are still shots of Bradley Cooper without his shirt on. For real method acting, he should have been circumcised.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.