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Originally Posted by irishgrl
I saw the movie many years ago, and I thought it was good, a bit hard to follow sometimes perhaps but I am not a movie critic, I just take it as it comes and do my best to understand the director's point....Im not sure why you hated it so much David, you must have impossibly high expectations for things...  |
It's all so garish & hyperactive it's like a Victorian melodrama mixed with a Mexican TV soap opera. However, it wasn't even enjoyable as camp. It's nothing but a series of climaxes, unfolding one on top of another, & none of them are really any fun. The movie is worse than operatic because there's nothing but grandiloquent aria after aria. After twenty or thirty minutes, I would have killed for a little recitative.
I wanted to know why the film was so goofball bad (it makes the Ken Russell movies play like chamber dramas) so I ran it back with the director's commentary. Bernard Rose sounded earnest in his desire to give the classical-music-phobic public a Beethoven fantasia, with sexy modern, "relevant" pulsations. But listening to him talk -- he's constantly botching details from the historical record: saying Grillparzer delivered the oration at the funeral; claiming the "Emperor" concerto premiere was a bomb; saying the "Moonlight" opening adagio is in cut time, & on & on -- I got the impression he's also fairly obtuse & very disingenuous. He's always rationalizing his campy, hysterical conceptions by vouching for their historical accuracy: he uses the phrase "100 Percent True" at least twenty times in his commentary. Whom is he trying to convince? I know it's unfair to try to glean a director's ability from his commentary, but Rose really comes across as a very ordinary talent: no dramatically good ideas, no keen perceptions, no sense of rhythm (ironic in a movie about Beethoven), no eye.
I was about to liken it to the annual fireworks "spectacular" at the Hollywood Bowl without the stars, but then I remembered the protagonist is actually shown swimming in a sea of them.