Maestro

#53moviesin52weeks #3 #2024 #Netflix #Oscars2024 #Maestro ¿De que trata? La visión de Bradley Cooper sobre la vida del compositor y director de orquesta Leonard Bernstein, cuuo éxito popular mas grande es West Side Story, y su esposa, Felicia Montealegre, retratada durante los 25 años de matrimonio de ambos. ¿Me gustó? Sentimientos encontrados. La pelicula es de una calidad inmensa, las actuaciones, fotografia, edición, dirección, implecables. La banda sonora es espectacular. Pero el señor Bernstein no me parece un personaje interesante, es antipático, no podes simpatizar con el y su historia no me parece interesante. La película es la típica "Oscar bait", va a estar nominada a un buen numero de premios, pero dudo que alcance mas de dos y ninguno en categorías principales, puesto que de lo poco que he visto, es superada en actuaciones por #Oppenheimer y #KillersOfTheFlowerMoon, y dirección por #Napoleon facilmente. Pero ya veremos. ¿Recomendable? Es lenta y biográfica, si ese no es tu rollo, no te va a gustar. Pero tiene una calidad enorme, y como amante del cine bien hecho, la disfrutaras. Le doy 🎶🎵🎶🎵y 1/4 de 🎵🎶🎵🎶🎵

Wow...Everybody is wrong about this one. Disliked by many in my mutuals, I kept putting this one off but I am just so impressed. Bradley Cooper absolutely nails it.
This shit so good that it made me grab my notepad and I ended up doing two pages of scribbles about how the film's portrayal of a man's ego made me view life.
This feels like a child of Scorsese which makes the fact Marty co-produced this even cooler. I feel sorry for people who genuinely think this is Oscar-bait.
Bradley, please stay in the director's chair. You are a force.

Maestro is a magnificent film. It is not just a story of Leonard Bernstein's life but rather a story about human life. I found myself surprised by the emotions it inspired. It is a beautiful picture with standout performances. Bravo Bradley Cooper.

Maestro (2023) was easily my favorite of these three films, perhaps because of my previous familiarity with Leonard Bernstein’s works (like West Side Story and Candide). Loosely following Bernstein’s (Bradley Cooper) career from his first big conducting gig at age 25, the movie is much more interested in Bernstein’s relationship to his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), and his complicated personal life as a queer man. This is to the movie’s benefit, as Bernstein’s career provides a rich backdrop to the tension that quietly grows in, around, and between members of his family. Early on, Felicia tells Leonard that she sees him for who he is, and that she is ok with it. They appear to have an agreement where he can seek out the pleasures he pleases; Felicia seems to agree to sharing. But when Leonard gets more overt with his transgressions, and the tide turns from sharing to being forgotten, Felicia understandably takes issue with what the status quo has become. The tension simmers in near silence – with the occasional verbose explosion – as Leonard refuses to formally reconcile until it is too late.

Serving as lead actor and director to this production, Bradley Cooper does a phenomenal job in his portrayal of Bernstein. Though there has been some backlash about the prosthetic work done to improve his likeness to the real Bernstein, the hair and makeup team on this movie deserve a huge amount of accolades for their accomplishments here (confirmed by their own Academy Award nomination); not only do they transform Cooper’s face, but they also subtly (and then all at once) age both Cooper and Mulligan across the decades of their relationship with work that is utterly convincing. The actors (again, both nominated for Academy Awards in their respective categories) take the transformative tools that they have been given and use them to craft performances that are entirely gripping; a Thanksgiving Day argument between the two is so real that it’s almost tempting to turn away out of embarrassment for having witnessed something so private. The screenplay and direction of its delivery are reflective of lifelike conversation – characters talk over one another, cut one another off, and quickly interject, and while this can get overwhelming, so can real conversations. It smudges the sheen of perfection that a lot of dialogue tends to have, and instead opts to lean into the imperfect mess that real communication can become, especially when love is involved. In a nice touch of stylistic intent, just like the makeup and the performances reflect the passing time, so to do the visual period pastiches – the film moves from a 4:3 aspect ratio in black and white to a widescreen format in full color, reflecting the film style of the time, and earning another Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.

My first movie of 2024 :) And it was a great movie.
Leonard Bernstein was such an inspiring and interesting person.
Plot, pacing, setting etc. were all great. Great choice to start off in black & white and then continue to "improve/enhance" the picture as the film progressed, representing the time in the history of television.
The acting? Just phenomenal. I had goosebumps nearly all the time.
The only downside for me was that one wasn't taught the cultural impact of Leonard Bernstein and his work. As someone who didn't know so much about this man other than he was a conductor and composer of many titles including "West Side Story", I still don't know anything more about his work.
Amazing execution of this biopic.

>==My personal rating:==
-Plot (Story Arc and Plausibility): 8.5/10
-Attraction (Premise & Entertainment Value): 8/10
-Theme (Identity & Depth): 8/10
-Acting (Characters & Performance): 9/10
-Dialogue (Storytelling & Context): 8/10
-Cinematography (Visual Language & Lighting, Setting, and Wardrobe): 9/10
-Editing (Pace & Effects): 7/10
-Soundtrack (Sound Design & Film Score): 8/10
-Directing (Vision & Execution): 8.5/10
-The “It” Factor (One-of-a-Kind & Transcendent): 9/10

>**Overall: 8/10 || 83/100**

Other than knowing it was directed by and starred Bradley Cooper, I went into this completely blind, to the point that I wasn't even aware that it was biopic until 20 minutes before the showtime and I certainly had no preexisting knowledge about Leonard Bernstein. But having quite enjoyed Cooper's first directorial effort (_A Star is Born (2018)_), I was still quite excited to see his second. Luckily, it lived up to that excitement.

Recently I've complained about slice-of-life movies where the slices are too thin to draw me in, or don't provide enough connective tissue for a cohesive narrative, but this movie avoids that completely. It not only delivers perfectly sized slices of the Bernsteins' life, but also perfectly chosen slices, with each helping to capture the nuance and complexities of their relationship. I can't speak to the accuracy of the portrayals, but I thought the performances were brilliant. I'd also credit the writing, as the dialogue was consistently thought provoking, but not unrealistically so. It's still rare for emotional beats to really land with me, but this film's final act certainly did, getting me watery-eyed in the theater.

With all of this said, I do think I'm somewhat predisposed to the subject matter. Not the world of classical music and conducting, which actually doesn't do anything for me at all (I definitely would have trimmed the extended conducting performance near the end), but the broader exploration of the troubled creative-type. As an aspiring screenwriter who is still crossing my fingers for a call up to the metaphorical Carnegie Hall, I certainly found elements of the story relatable.

Magnificent film
Having had such a great time with TÁR, I was really looking forward to this especially to see Bradley Cooper get his teeth into something since he did Burnt.
The story of Leonard Bernstein somebody who I'm not familiar with. This beautiful picture is filled with amazing performances by Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan followed by a great supporting cast, also who thought that Sarah Silverman can act that well. Amazing cinematography, for example I loved the way they synchronised one scene to another soo cleanly and the decision to make the earlier part of Leonard’s life shot in black & white then the later part in colour was a great choice. My only issue is the second act dragged a bit.

Wowowowowow, you're all absolutely crazy for not loving this movie.

Bradley Cooper is incredible. Definitely Oscar-worthy. I loved the way the film evolves over time as if it was filmed during the time it took place. They did such a great job matching the sound and rhythm of the language as it was when Leonard and Felicia were young. And such a beautiful representation of a complicated yet powerful relationship.

Beautiful love story, which touched me and made me think about what is important in life.
Great actors and cinematography.
I also liked that - although a biopic of Bernstein - the focus is very strong on the person which made him the person that he is: his wife Felicia Montealegre