Friday new releases: 22 December 2023

Maestro is on Netflix

Holiday schedule

Firstly, for the free sub­scribers who won’t see this if I put it below the pay­wall, this is the last news­let­ter for 2023. I don’t pub­lish on week­ends and pub­lic hol­i­days and I’m giv­ing myself days off for the in-between days, too.

The next news­let­ter will be on Wednesday 3 January.

I’ll be review­ing the Christmas new releases for RNZ, though, so look out for updates here through­out the holidays.

After miss­ing out an a very tent­at­ive (to say the least) cinema release, we finally got to watch Bradley Cooper’s follow-up to A Star Is Born last night and it was quite an experience.

It’s the time of year to be in guest-mode and one of our house­guests’ appre­ci­ation of movies is greatly enhanced by closed captions/subtitles.

This is not com­mon for us. We prefer sub­titles to dub­bing of for­eign lan­guage films and tv, but don’t use the English cap­tions for English. (Perhaps we should. I’ll have some­thing to say about the lack of dynam­ic range and com­pres­sion of dia­logue, even in stream­ing Atmos soundtracks, at a later date.)

So we watched Maestro with the cap­tions on and it was very dif­fer­ent – to the extent that K and I both said we needed to watch it again soon without the cap­tions. That’s not to say that it was a bad exper­i­ence, just unusual.

The import­ant thing to note is that the film is first rate, des­pite some luke­warm reviews from else­where. It’s a thought­ful, artistically-drawn, superbly craf­ted por­trait of a com­plic­ated rela­tion­ship between two cre­at­ive people. While it didn’t quite man­age to untangle all of the com­plic­a­tions of composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and act­ress Felecia Monteleagre (Carey Mulligan), it gets as close as any­one who wasn’t there has a right to.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Cooper (who co-wrote the script as well as dir­ect­ing and star­ring) recre­ates time and place bet­ter than any­one I have seen in recent times. The party scenes in their Manhattan apart­ment in the 1970s are so deli­ciously remin­is­cent of the glossy magazine spreads of the time that the craftspeople (cine­ma­to­graph­er Matthew Libatique, cos­tume design­er Mark Bridges and pro­duc­tion design­er Kevin Thompson) deserve all the praise we can come up with. Kodak also deserve a round of applause for not going out of busi­ness ten years ago so we can watch a film that actu­ally looks like a film.

Cooper is tre­mend­ous as Bernstein (many more plaudits to the pros­thet­ic makeup legend Kazu Hiro who gives him makeup that he – and every­one else – can act with) but all the awards should go to Mulligan who, I believe, the film is really about.

Back to those cap­tions, then. There’s some­thing about read­ing a line before you hear it that is very dis­tan­cing. You end up pre­dict­ing a line read­ing and then judging each one on how close it gets to your ima­gin­a­tion. Like read­ing a nov­el at the same time as you watch an adapt­a­tion. It’s not an exper­i­ence I would recom­mend, even though we could see it was abso­lutely neces­sary for our view­ing companion.

But there is an aspect to the cap­tion­ing that was an abso­lute game-changer. The cap­tions identi­fy the music on the soundtrack, inform­a­tion that would be simply inac­cess­ible to an audi­ence in a theatre. Unless a) you were already an expert in Bernstein’s music or b) you were sur­repti­tiously Shazaming your way through the screening.

So, after a tense con­ver­sa­tion between Felecia and Lenny about his choice of week­end house­guest (where his extra-marital rela­tion­ships with oth­er men were the sub­ject while not actu­ally being men­tioned), we cut to Lenny at the piano back in the house and the cap­tion reads “‘Secret Songs’ by Leonard Bernstein play­ing” and your mind gets blown ever so slightly at how hard this film is work­ing on even a sub­lim­in­al level.

I don’t want to recom­mend that film­makers should beat you over the head with the sub­text by actu­ally telling you what all their music choices are, just that in this par­tic­u­lar case my enjoy­ment was enhanced by the know­ledge at the same time as I was strug­gling with the dis­trac­tion of it.

Further reading

I’ve got to equal-38 in the Sight & Sound best films of all time list: Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. My take is up now at RNZ.