Bel Canto (2018) Reviews

• Unfinished business

  vasileioskyvellos2018-09-25

  Hardly a realistic plot to narrate, with great perspective though mostly because of Julianne. And somewhere between small doses of suspense and greater of humanity, the film leaves us with the feeling of unfinished business, as if the director wanted simply to proceed without the emotional strength, this movie could bring. It got flat at this very moment anyone expected the power behind the facts. Anyway, it was no waste of time, enjoyable but ...something finally was missing.

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• Artless hackery

  phahof2018-09-23

  When I read this book in 2001, I was struck by how cinematic the writing was. The story was tragic and operatic--perfect for film. Why it took so long, I don't know, but this movie is a major disappointment. Weitz had a brilliant cast and Rene Fleming's voice to work with and he wasted both of them. The most powerful moment in the book is when the guerrillas are going to execute a hostage and the singer faces them down and blasts them with "O mio babbino caro". Violence is impossible in the face of such beauty and the entire dynamic of the situation is changed. Choosing to cut out that scene was the first indicator that this director/screenwriter was clueless about this material. The final assault that frees the hostages was just bad action movie crap. We need this scene to be operatic: the saddest aria in the repertoire blasting on the soundtrack as the assault plays out in slow motion--the death of each of the characters we have grown to know devastating us as we watch them gunned down one by one with all the tragic pathos of a great opera. Patchett's novel deserves better.

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• Never go the the opera

  greenheart2018-11-20

  Classical music meets terrorism, an interesting mix. Some of the scenes in this movie are just a shade bizarrre, at times the tension is quite good, particularly in the first half of the movie, but then the tension gets broken by these odd scenes. I think the movie tries to touch on some of the terrorists vulnerabilities and how such people end up with semi-automatic weapons in their hands. But it doesn't quite get there, I wish it had stuck to one genre and thrown all its energies into that area. At the end of the day, I preferred the tension and drama to the love scenes which I didn't find plausible. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the movie, I just feel that it never falls into the greatness category. My favourite quote from the movie "Are you sure they won't shoot, not everyone likes opera"

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• Kitsch

  ferdinand19322018-09-22

  This is a meretricious and pretentious piece of kitsch. The artistic faults are not the filmmakers, nor the actors, because the film is a perfectly well-made piece of middle-brow entertainment. The moral and artistic failure lies in the writing. Not even Renee Fleming's signature piece, 'Song to the Moon', as mimed by Moore, can amend the dreadful experience of this film. Firstly the title which does not refer to the style of bel canto opera, nor is there a piece of Donizetti or Bellini through which it could string a reason in order to use the term. There is not much singing of any kind apart from Puccini's 'Vissi d'arte', another typical name-checking aria which makes it clear that the use of bel canto is a silly irrelevant borrowing in order to add a vestige of style. Then there is the drama itself which follows a predictable and sentimental course in which the leads fall for each other. Their bond is abbreviated, and it is not polite to say how, but it is a piece of deliberate and unsubtle manipulation, as well as very hackneyed plotting which ought to have been excised before it had been written. Of course, as is the nature with this comforting vacuous work, love strives to conquer all, and all the struggles by the protagonists are in the name of love. This bromide, this stupefyingly simplistic nonsense, is incapable of providing drama beyond the stale and bland product it is. It pretends to assume a form of drama with guns and noble gestures and a conflict of ideas but that pseudo battle and tragedy is elided with Dvorák's song. It's probable that the meaning of that song in the opera Rusalka evaded the understanding of all involved too. For real bel canto drama, Donizetti's Tudor Queens operas (Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena and Roberto Devereux) are much better.

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• Unusual, involving and funny

  phd_travel2018-09-13

  Quite different from anything I've ever seen before, this hostage movie is not a thriller but more of a story about bonding between very different people. Full use is made of the international cast from Japanese to Latin American to German and French. The comedic parts in the middle are laugh out loud funny. Like the guard at the door of her bedroom saying it's like a Telenovela. And the terrorist learning to sing. Julianne Moore is lovely and very diva looking. Her singing is dubbed by Renee Fleming but Julianne's lip synching isn't that convincing - her mouth moves but her body and neck don't heave with the breaths that opera singers take. She has chemistry with Ken Watanabe and they look quite good together. Too bad his character had to be a martyr. What happened to Christopher Lambert? He looks so strange. The Stockholm syndrome thing goes a bit too far with the Japanese translator and Carmen. It's interesting to see the bond between the terrorists and captives develop. They are not the really bad type of terrorists just bent on killing for no reason. But in the end I think the unreserved caring that the captives had for the fate of the terrorists was hard to buy. It's based loosely on the Japanese Embassy hostage crisis in Peru but the romances and diva thing are made up. Very much worth a watch.

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