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 Annette is a film about a stand-up comedian who isn't afraid to tell it like it is (Adam Driver) and a massively talented opera singer (Marillon Cotillard) at the height of their careers; their romance; the opera singer's accompanist (Simon Helberg); shutting the gently caress up while watching a movie, and much more. It's also a musical.  The director is Leos Carax, the genius French auteur behind masterpieces like Holy Motors and Mauvais Sang, helming his first English language movie.  The beloved cult duo Sparks did all the music. They, along with Carax, also wrote the movie and (again along with Carax) are in the movie. The movie is tremendously weird and definitely the sort of thing you will likely love or hate. Personally I absolutely love it.
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Aug 23, 2021 16:35
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| # ? May 5, 2024 04:37 |
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I'm not usually one to yuck a thread's yum but in brief, I didn't make it past 100 minutes and I thought it was bafflingly awful, with disjointed tone, glacial pacing, bad songs, and worse singing. I'm far from the biggest Holy Motors fan but that had remarkable spectacle that Annette sorely lacks. Having said that, I would recommend it to cinephiles because it scales such great heights as a fiasco. Just writing this out now I was thinking about how The Apple is a better musical. The Apple!
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Aug 23, 2021 21:26
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It's hard to imagine getting 100 minutes into a movie before bailing, that's some serious hatred
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Aug 24, 2021 06:14
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It definitely wasn't hatred. It was just astonishing that so much can't-miss talent got together and just...missed. I kept watching thinking, that can't be it. But it was. Expectations certainly played a role. I mean, Leos Carax did THIS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8fLGeaG91E Annette has some nice visual composition but nothing magical like that.
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Aug 24, 2021 14:26
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There’s a lot I liked about it but there were long stretches of incredible boredom. My main issue is I wish it was a playful with its plot as it was with the medium of film - it’s a very rote story. Still, Adam Driver is fantastic, as is Cotillard, though she disappointingly gets far less time to shine. The composer character is a total treat. I thought the “doll” worked very well particularly the shocking moment when the camera cuts away and we see a real human girl in front of us I also didn’t really love the music aside from the opening track, which slaps. All in all a worthwhile movie to see on the big screen if you feel up to braving a theater in these times (I saw it at the Siskel in Chicago) and are ready for some unconventional filmmaking.
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Aug 24, 2021 15:27
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Mike N Eich posted:There’s a lot I liked about it but there were long stretches of incredible boredom. My main issue is I wish it was a playful with its plot as it was with the medium of film - it’s a very rote story. Yeah, after thinking on it I enjoyed it but it's both a) interminably long at points in the service of very repetitive songs and b) absolutely not for everyone. I left saying to my partner that it was terrible and I loved it, while they just hated it. Even though I really like Sparks, the songs mostly whiffed. Not in a lyrical level, but in an expository and thematic way; it was almost childlike, and not in a way that reflected the film. The Conductor's monologue was awesome, though. Also I felt really, really bad for laughing way too much at the Superbowl announcer saying "what the gently caress is that little bitch doing" about a toddler, and also Annette's line of "daddy kills people".
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Aug 24, 2021 22:20
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I, Butthole posted:Yeah, after thinking on it I enjoyed it but it's both a) interminably long at points in the service of very repetitive songs and b) absolutely not for everyone. I left saying to my partner that it was terrible and I loved it, while they just hated it.
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Aug 25, 2021 03:26
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I don't regret watching it, but I also felt like it was way too long for what it is. I almost quit on it when I checked 80 minutes in and there was still an hour to go. I also felt like the songs were the weakest part. I like Sparks and everything but there were no good tunes and the lyrics were so literal and on-the-nose they reminded me of this old YouTube. I also wondered how Bo Burnham felt about Adam Driver's character. Did anyone else notice how many amazing and unusual lamps were in the sets in this? I kept thinking someone in the production must have a collection they wanted to show off or something because every scene had a lamp that made me go "Wow that's another great lamp I really want."
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Sep 6, 2021 02:32
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I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw parallels between the Man Ape standup and Burnham. I actually checked to see if he was involved at all. Like the other people I thought the acting, directing, and design were great though goddamn was the doll creepy. But the songs were bad and didn't have a purpose other than repeating obvious things over and over and the plot was trite and the whole thing just dragged. Plus the random MeToo-esque segment that was then mostly dropped was weird. Basically the whole thing is interesting in that a bunch of very talented people got involved but could not rescue the dreck of a story.
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Sep 7, 2021 05:18
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i feel like this 140 minute movie would have been an incredible 70 minute film.
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Sep 7, 2021 13:11
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I made it over half way before needing to sleep. There is something about the stand up that I’m having trouble explaining. A review of the movie treated his show as just a weird comedy routine. The way I interpreted it, much of what is being said or sung in the first half of movie is what the characters are experiencing or feeing, not real dialogue. So the stand up is not what his show would actually be, but the feelings everyone is experiencing while being there. That’s how my brain understood it, at least.
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Sep 8, 2021 16:50
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Have you seen Bo Burnham's 'Inside'? You could be right, of course, but a lot of Henry's standup felt to me exactly like Burnham b-sides, i.e. a young comedian whose entire schtick is playing with 'how much of this is real' in terms of disillusionment with fame, his own mental illness, nihilism, open contempt for his audience, etc. Someone way too smart who got scary famous way too young and can now almost say or do anything and have an audience ready to eat it up and declare its brilliance, and who simultaneously loves that and hates it -- or does he and it's all just a character?
Imagined fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Sep 8, 2021 |
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Sep 8, 2021 23:14
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Henry's shows, like Baby Annette, are suppose to be taken serious, even quite literally. Henry's is incredibly vain and narcissist, but his comedy act is him to be seen as an artist who is being open about his issues and feelings, wringing comedy out of being self-deprecating. He isn't. He's a huge fraud. He resents, and hates, Anne's actual willingness to "die" every day on the stage for an audience, while for him it's just a gag. The show where the audience turns on him is where he actually ends up being open about his issues and insecurities, that he hates his wife and wants to kill her. He finally lets people gaze into the abyss, but he doesn't. Disagree that the film is suppose to be seen as a comedy(though there are funny moments), people are already going into this thinking it's going to be a rock/pop musical with catchy songs and big acts, instead of being (Sparks) Opera and musical theater, an anti-musical at that. The film is quite sour and sad. This is a story about a man misogyny consuming, and infecting, the women around him. The MeToo section is quite important cause it's when Anne starts to be aware of how her husband treats her. Anne's lingering feelings that Henry doesn't care or even respect her about her given form in a nightmare where women come forward denouncing abuse at his hands. I really liked the film. Loved Baby Annette. Loved how fake and in your face the CGI storm is. Loved that Adam Driver can't really sing, but that it never stops him from trying. The ending was wonderful. Electronico6 fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Sep 9, 2021 |
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Sep 9, 2021 00:03
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I really liked the 1940s' soundstage-iness of the yacht scene too. I agree that the obvious artificiality of the whole thing was very deliberate and a major point of the film.
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Sep 9, 2021 00:07
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I haven’t seen Inside, but from what I know of it your comparison makes sense. The audience participation is what made me question if it was really happening the way we were being shown. I know Rocky Horror has participation for example, but his show doesn’t seem to make sense unless everyone already knows what to do. Plus, the part after where they sing “We are so in love” for 10 minutes, I got to thinking that the movie was trying to replace all dialogue (or even lyrics) with the basics about what the characters are experiencing. That doesn’t seem to stick for the entire film though.
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Sep 9, 2021 02:53
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Carwash oval office posted:I haven’t seen Inside, but from what I know of it your comparison makes sense. The audience participation is what made me question if it was really happening the way we were being shown. I know Rocky Horror has participation for example, but his show doesn’t seem to make sense unless everyone already knows what to do. So, played straight doesn't mean simple. But it means there's not some sort of, like, tricky divide between the actual plot and the certain musical elements that are meant to be read as someone's imagination. People's inner feelings are up there on the screen, and one of the methods for this is having them sung, but that doesn't make this movie different from other movies. All movies portray the emotional inner lives of the characters in certain ways. This one just happens to do it through (among other things) people singing.
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Sep 9, 2021 03:42
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The music is definitely more in-line with Lil Beethoven where they repeat lyrics until it morphs into being more about the rhythm and sound of the words rather than the meaning. Lil Beethoven is hypnotic and wonderful, Annette not so much. It's a film I appreciate more from a creative standpoint rather than sitting and enjoying watching it, and I'm a Sparks dork. One thing's for certain though: Sextown U.S.A. is a loving jam.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTdR2NLEsPA
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Sep 9, 2021 03:43
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In this interview I think Carax gets to the heart of the film pretty succinctly:Leos Carax posted:The only changes I made were with the writing. It was only a storyline without characters. The brothers live in this Sparks bubble, which is pop fantasy. There was a lot of irony. Irony in a cinema is a danger, I think. It has a tendency to make everything less crucial, less real. It’s a bit too easy for cinema, especially today. I had to make that irony into something else. We had to really create Henry as a character. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/08/annette-sparks-brothers-leos-carax-collaboration-1234655722/
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Sep 9, 2021 13:42
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| # ? May 5, 2024 04:37 |
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Saw this today. It was an interesting experience but the repetition of the lyrics really made songs drag when they could have been enjoyable and memorable. The Conductor stuff was good and some other songs were complex enough to be too which made the rest of it disappointing by comparison.
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Nov 2, 2021 10:12
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