Change Your Image
vicki_kozel
Reviews
The Lobster (2015)
Boring, unnecessary, pretentious and contrived.
A kitchen sink of arbitrary ideas. The director is just throwing crap against the wall and seeing what sticks. The story is based on a feeble and unconvincing premise. Anyone who fails to stay in committed relationships is turned into an animal. What?? When did the society care so much for everyone to be with a partner? The motivations of individual characters are just as uncompelling as the obstacles they are "forced" to overcome. Depictions of cruelty come from a desperate desire to move the story that is dead in the water and does not self-propel. I watched quite a bit of self-centered, pseudo-profound European movies in my youth; I never thought something like that would fly here. Miraculously it does. If this is a trend, we are in for some ugly, sad cinematic dystopia.
Seymour: An Introduction (2014)
Hope more people will see and review this film.
Sane, clean and perfectly put together, this film is a quiet rebellion against vulgarity and sensationalism so prevalent in today's entertainment and art. The documentary is a portrait of a classical pianist, drawn by a movie star, in which a master musician ponders on the relationship between a person and his inner creative self. A topic like this always runs a risk of coming across as abstract and esoteric, which in this film is delightfully not the case. The conversation ends up being about subjects painstakingly relevant to any performer: stage fright (and what an artist should make of it), craft, truthfulness to the source, eccentricity versus authenticity, teaching, artistic bravery and success.
The film is filled with wonderful stories like this one: drafted into the army during the Korean War, Seymour finds himself marching for miles tirelessly while his fellow soldiers, seemingly stronger and more fit than he is, faint of exhaustion. He attributes his endurance to his "musician mind set", an explanation, both, unexpected and convincing in the context of the film.
Seymour's every action is motivated by honesty. If there was a stage in his life where he did not feel completely in peace internally, he corrects that eventually, always bringing himself to a state of a perfect inner comfort. There are a few examples of these struggles in the film – the most notable one, of course, is Seymour quitting his successful concert pianist career in favor of teaching.
Very appropriately, the film mimics its subject in its honesty and uncompromising taste. Unfortunately, it also does so in its limited popularity. Call me naive, but I really don't get how a piece of nonsense like Fifty Shades of Grey grows in its media presence with every new bad review it gets, and how a treasure like "Seymour
" gets overlooked by 99.9% of cinema goers.
One more thing. The film is a visual and musical feast. From Seymour's shaded solitary apartment in Manhattan, to the breathtakingly beautiful views of Central Park, to the Rotunda of Steinway Hall, to piano pieces by Chopin, Schumann, Beethoven and Bach, there are countless delicacies for the audiences to savor. If the film had no other merits, but cinematography and musical score, it'd be still worth watching.