PhantomKnight
CS! Gold
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 20,532 
Likes: 3,135
Location:
Last Online Nov 26, 2024 0:22:29 GMT -5
|
Post by PhantomKnight on Jan 2, 2021 12:57:51 GMT -5
My last movie of 2020 turned out to be Let Them All Talk, an HBO Max original movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen, Diane Wiest and Lucas Hedges and featuring all improvised dialogue if the stories are to be believed. And hearing the dialogue in this film, I'm inclined to believe that was indeed the case. The past few years, it's safe to say that Soderbergh has embraced his more experimental side than usual in various ways, and if anything else, this on-the-spot approach for having his characters talk is an interesting experiment, if not entirely successful. On the one hand, if Soderbergh was going for a more authentic feel for the conversations, he certainly achieved that. On the other, the result is we're left with lots of pauses between words, "ummm's", "so's" and general tongue stumbling that after a while, gets kind of old and just slightly annoying. Not only that, but this off-the-cuff style isn't exactly rich with dramatic purpose or intent. Don't get me wrong, where the movie ends up is certainly a dramatic denouement, but its impact is considerably lessened by the fact that the path to get there was a bit too lackadaisical in nature, even if that was the point. Soderbergh is clearly going for a laid-back, breezy, almost jazzy tone here and that's fine and he achieves that, but the catch there is that such an approach renders this movie dramatically static. The film makes it clear that there is a bit of tension between these three girlfriends, yet it seems all too content to have these characters continually sidestep this conflict in favor of enjoying the cruise ship they're on. That may work in theory, but not so much in execution. But with that said, it's hard to call Let Them All Talk an outright bad film. For what it is and what it's trying to accomplish, it executes serviceably and if nothing else, it's interesting to watch unfold. But it is a decidedly more minor effort from Steven Soderbergh.
**1/2 /****
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,106
Likes: 5,732
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by Dracula on Jan 24, 2021 22:21:10 GMT -5
Let Them All Talk(1/20/2021)
One would think that a new movie from a major filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh would be a pretty big event but his latest film Let Them All Talk has stayed pretty far under the radar since debuting on HBO Max despite the presence of some pretty big high profile actors like Meryl Streep, Lucas Hedges, Candice Bergen, and Dianne Wiest. Watching it it’s pretty apparent that this has been low profile because this is very much Soderbergh working in an experimental mode but doing it in a way that’s at least disguised with the veneer of being a “normie” movie about senior citizens going wild on a boat. The film concerns an author played by Streep who takes an ocean cruise to England in order to accept an award and brings along her college friends, publishing contact, and her teenage/young adult nephew along with her and some tensions from their pasts arise. The movie was filmed on an actual ship, during an actual cruise, which was populated with paying customers who were not aware that there was a Meryl Streep movie being made in their midst and while it doesn’t indulge in any candid camera shenanigans that is an interesting background and you get the impression that a lot of the scenes here are being at least partly improvised. I tend not to be super patient with Soderbergh when he’s in understated experiment mode and that certainly went for this one as well. These characters did not do much for me; Streep’s character has a certain New York society snobbery which did not make her overly endearing and I didn’t get much out of the various psychodrama’s she had with her friends and I found the Hedges character to be cringingly awkward and rather strange. I can see a world where this experiment worked out better, and I’m sure there are audiences that would take to these characters more than I did, but for me this missed the mark.
** out of Five
|
|
