"Immortal Beloved"

[David]

I finally got around to seeing this. I had been slightly curious about it for several years, but I felt for a long time that I knew what sort of movie it would be, & so I avoided it for several more years. But I finally gave in -- I guess because I got my NetFlix queue down to a manageable length.

"Immortal Beloved" was exactly what I expected it to be for the last ten years: an abomination of a movie. There's no characterization to speak of, there's no pacing, there's no directorial vision (only bad directorial ideas reminiscent of Grand Guignol), there's no believable motivation shown for any of the conflicts or events in the film, there are no genuinely good performances (although there's a good deal of sniveling & bug-eyed stares), & the music itself is used on the soundtrack in the most embarrassingly programmatic way: matching each big theme to a big "event." It's all so silly & hyped-up ridiculous that I can truly be said to have hated the whole damn thing.

People were actually moved by this muck? It's nothing but a series of climaxes, one on top of another; the movie is worse than operatic because there's nothing but grandiloquent, melodramatic aria after aria. There isn't even any recitative!

A stinking abomination of a film, poorly shot, poorly edited (countless times the reverse angle shots cut to the wrong person talking in a conversation) & as graceless as a . . . well, as a performance of the Ninth Symphony by a high school orchestra.

About thirty minutes into it, I thought maybe the director was pulling our leg.

The only thing I enjoyed was a three-minute scene with the great Barry Humphries as Prince Metternich; I wish Humphries would enlist the aid of his grande-dame alter-ego Dame Edna & make an entire Beethoven movie as a cut-up lampoon--it would have more heart & soul in it than this inadvertent kitschfest with cannons & pistols & tempers going off like firecrackers blowing up in our face.