TV/Movies Megathread

[celedhring]

So, I took my mom to watch the Maria Callas movie, which is a very mom movie. It chronicles the last week of the life of Maria Callas, played by Angelina Jolie. She wanders through Paris with her brain drenched in opioids, talking to characters real and imaginary while she reflects on her life.

Like the other movies in the trilogy that preceded it (Jackie and Spencer) the film looks gorgeous, but it really fails at portraying anything particularly insightful of its main character either as a person or as an icon. Jolie delivers an actually pretty good performance (might be one of her best, tbf), but she is saddled with pretentious dialogue throughout. The best part of the film was the relationship with her servants, which is the only time the script allows her to be more human.

In some weird way the movie feels a lot like an Euro 1970s new wave movie - with all the the lampshading of narrative artifice, collage techniques and the dreamlike approach of mixing fantasy and reality. I don't know if that's intended as part of the recreation - but I give it props for trying a different approach to the biopic. That and the fact that Jolie is really good in it made the movie watchable.