Nice effects though.

Best movie of this year hands down!

Awesome Movie

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A film that fails to ignite much interest. Not for the first time in recent memory Pfeiffer plays the older woman in love with a younger man, in this case one much younger. Scorsese and Pfeiffer covered some of this same territory in The Age of Innocence, and to much better effect. She is a courtesan, he the son of another famous courtesan. He has led an indolent life, spoiled throughout his entire existence. As a result he has grown to manhood completely divorced from any feelings for anyone. Instead he allows himself to be forced into a hastily arranged marriage by his ambitious mother, to a young woman he neither loves nor cares for. He is indifferent to his wife and drifts back and forth between the two women.The script is pretty nondescript in places. Pfeiffer has a few decent lines and still radiates enough screen presence to carry some scenes, and Bates matches her well. Most of the problems with this film are based on the male character Cheri (Friend). He is left with too little too late for us to care about his fate. lnstead he allows himself to have his opinions formed for him by his mother and and Lea who also does much of what passes for thinking on his behalf as well. He is married off to a woman he doesn't love, and then proceeds to drift between her and his lover without ever showing any real sense of commitment to either. Due to the limitations of the script and his character, he comes across as only half formed, and too many scenes end with him staring blankly into the camera, looking quite vacuous, and a penny for his thoughts would be an understatement of inflation. lt is not easy to know which audience this movie is aimed at. It is not quite glamorous enough to be mainstream nor is it memorable enough to be art-house. As a result it meanders along without ever really being anything more than an exercise in self indulgence. That is a pity as l was expecting a fair bit more from those involved.

"Cheri," based on the novels by French author Colette, is not a film targeted at men in their early twenties, nor is it the type of film I would have autonomously sought out, however the power of a free screening will dispel just about any of my cobwebbed genre prejudices, at least so far as putting me in a seat. "Cheri," unfortunately, is neither a particularly compelling love story nor a particularly convincing period piece. Stephen Frears, who helmed 2006's Oscar-baiting "Queen," but is perhaps best known for heady romcom "High Fidelity," directs, and though the most glaring issues with the film are issues with the screenplay as an adaptation, Frears' direction doesn't elevate the occasionally interesting banter or the by- the-numbers romantic beats.The bottom line is that "Cheri" plays it safe. For a story about an intergenerational relationship between a moody teenager (Rupert Friend) and a retired lady of the evening (Michelle Pfeiffer), "Cheri" risks offending exactly no one. The film is apparently R-rated, which is puzzling, as the scenes of sensuality barely border on the suggestive, and I completely fail to recall the "brief drug use" outlined by the MPAA. It's a sallow, forgettable piece of film-making that owes its only redeeming qualities to earlier, edgier artists. "Harold and Maude," for example, sort of broke the age barrier for romance films back in '71, and the cinematic landscape is peppered with more interesting depictions of prostitutes."Cheri" also lacks a consistent, elegant art direction, usually a staple in even mediocre period pieces. Production designer Alan MacDonald's costumes are gaudy and caricatural, though perhaps impressive if only for their sheer audacity. If widest sunhat diameter or most phosphorescent gown are new categories at this year's academy awards, "Cheri" has them in the bag. Macdonald's set design also under-impresses, rarely providing more than a stodgy veneer of the early nineteenth century, a chasm between the source material that's only widened by the wincingly mawkish dialogue. Christopher Hampton's screenplay paints Lea and her eponymous partner Cheri as cardboard lovers, and Pfeiffer and Friend's sexual chemistry is almost non-existent.The rest of the performances are passable, though the inauthentic dialogue is a constant stumbling block, even for the usually-stellar Kathy Bates, who seems oddly defanged and miscast in her supporting role as Cheri's manipulative mother. The characters are veiled in a layer of faux-elegance, feeling more often like uniformed impressions of turn-of-the- century women than the genuine article. The suspension of disbelief is kept at arm's length.But I don't mean to suggest that "Cheri" is at all a worthless film; it's just an unnecessary one, which is almost as bad. The story itself is adequate, but has no strong reason for existence. Colette's novels ("Cheri" and "The Last of Cheri"), which were combined for the film version, saw publication in France in 1920 and 1926 respectively, assumedly to a more scandalized audience then today's, which were so recently witness to the spectacle of Sacha Baron Cohen's "Bruno.""Cheri" is too reserved a film to justify recommendation. It brings nothing new to the film-making landscape in either content or craft, and though the score by Alexandre Desplat is impressive, probably the picture's highlight, it seems to have wandered into "Cheri" from some more interesting film, upbeat and suspenseful while the plot is languid and sedentary.I don't think I'm letting my prejudice get the better of me in the case of "Cheri." Romance fan or no, there isn't a clear reason why Frears' latest is worth seeking out, even for free.

It is difficult to do justice or condemn this film. From the start it hits a jarring note: cards flying like swift balloons (while the air blows out of them?) of plump fin-de-siecle belles and then the bony Michelle? This is something else than tongue-in-cheek.The design, the palette, the clothes are sumptuous, sometimes stunning. Also, particularly the stage set, is so self-knowingly, amusingly, coldly theatrical. I mention this because in such demi-monde, quasi-moral tales the sets set the tone, either of the narrative, of the allegorizing moral, of the wry, detached humor, or of the quasi-queasy lifelessness.Oh! It is the Belle Epoque - a funnily voiced narrator always intrudes, as if to mock the moral tone of such a proceeding and also to pinpoint the self-mockery of what he narrates - and a courtesan high and slowly retired falls for a so much younger lover, the son of a "colleague", while entertaining a detached air and the illusion that experience can be bemused and amused by passion, having achieved some sort of self mastery.It all proves so misinformed; the couple, after six years on the frothy float of erotic bliss, runs out of the proverbial champagne: we are introduced to the moment of crisis with just enough foregrounding in the beginnings of their liaison, and introduced in a bizarrely appropriate way: Cheri trying on a pearl necklace debates whether he should have it, since it looks so much better on him. It is deliciously epicene the way it is presented, with just the right amount of clueless poutiness by Cheri and strikes an ominous note that in a way is matched only in the end, after a painstaking cinematic, wandering arch. They seem to know they run out of champagne, but they still want to dissolve pearls in it, for the taste and the thrill. The problem with this film is the directorial approach: I am not sure I have grasped what Mr. Frears tries to accomplish after decades of film-making, that much being sure: the film's looks are too sumptuous for them to match the guignol sensibility of Colette's subtle humor. But let's say, leave it as it is, let it be more on the English side (or to the American one with Kathy Bates being as continental as a burger) than on the French one. Mr. Frears is usually portraying women, but his method here fails: an empty face in the end (reminnicent of Glenn Close's at the end of the "Liaisons"), is what it makes it awkward: I do not think Colette invested in any sense of tragic morality. Instead her tone is more mischievous, as suits the French. That does not mean she is not sympathetic to her characters, but rather that it is out of this sensibility's context if one saves or loses face. I would go as far as claim that Colette would not subscribe to the notion that women have a face; it is difficult with such a claim to achieve mischievous entertainment.It is also jarringly funny the fact that Colette and Rupert Friend, courtesy of make-up and wig, look alarmingly alike. Was this a way-too-inside note for Colette's lesbianism? Anyway, as it is, the film's rich cinematography captures the pearly perfection of Cheri's skin-tone, courtesy of Mr. Friend's English complexion.Perhaps one should take the ending titles as a key to how one should watch this film: panels slide one on top of the other; panels of letters evoking amorous ones, panels of tapestry evoking interiors where painful and delicious meetings take place, and screens behind which people get naked and clothed.

Stephen Frears has created some powerful and very well crafted movies: 'Dangerous Liaisons', 'My Beautiful Laundrette', 'The Grifters', 'The Queen', 'Prick up your Ears', 'Dirty Pretty Things', etc. One would expect that his experience in dealing with edgy issues would make him the perfect choice for adapting the famous French writer of 'naughty novels' - Colette - but somewhere in the flow of this production, perhaps in the Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the novel to screenplay, the original stories become perfumed and sanitized. And the reasons why this happened remain obscure. The story is simple: courtesans in Paris must eventually retire form their lives of becoming wealthy through pleasing men of the higher class, and either they live out their lives in the luxuries of fluff or they must confront their aging and feel pangs of remorse as they end their lives alone, without a man to bolster them. Lea de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer) has been longtime 'friends' with Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates), even to the point of nurturing Madame's son Chéri (Rupert Friend) as he approaches manhood. Madame asks Lea to 'polish' Chéri for other women and after what might have been a brief fling in Normandy, the young Chéri and the aging Lea fall into a six year relationship. But as Madame realizes she needs grandchildren, she eventually finds a proper girl Edmee (Felicity Jones) for Chéri to marry. The remainder of the story is how these two age-disparate characters adapt to the 'social rules' of La Belle Epoque, suggesting that even under extraordinary circumstances the power of love is an issue that must be confronted. Despite the performances by Pfeiffer and Friend (and even the miscast Bates) the story feels somehow sterile. Perhaps it is the out of place use of a male narrator who gives the film an unnecessary feeling of being a documentary, or the somewhat overused musical score of Alexandre Desplat, or the emphasis on costumes that hardly add to the beauty of Pfeiffer as Lea that keep the production grounded. It is a pleasant enough film, but hardly a memorable one. Grady Harp