Giuppi's Movie Reviews

Hi everyone! I'm sorry if I've being absent in the last few weeks, but I couldn't find the time to post my reviews here. I hope I'll be more active in the future, in the meantime I've decided to post here a few short reviews of some movies I've seen in the last month.  Monster  (2003) Patty Jenkins' Monster is mostly remembered for Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning turn as serial killer Aileen Wuornos. And while the actress' towering, bone-chilling performance is indeed its strongest asset, it's also a movie worth-mentioning per se. It's hardly a perfect film and from a technical point of view it leaves something to be desired. The cinematography is drab and unappealing, which could have been fitting for the story, but there's no sense of a visual style of any kind. The editing is clumsy, especially in an awkwardly done montage at the movie's end. The structure and the pace are problematic with some passages being far too rus...

Though presented as a true account of the life of the actress Frances Farmer, Frances  has been proved in later years to be a largely fictionalized telling of her story, more based on the actress' inaccurate biography written by William Arnold rather than historical facts. Speaking for myself, I'm not particularly bothered by the lack of historical inaccuracy as long as it is not ridiculously and blatantly obvious and most importantly does not betray the nature of the person involved (a recent exemple is The Greatest Showman , in which P.T. Barnum, by all accounts an exploiter, is turned into a champion of diversity and human rights). The problems with Frances extend past its historical innacuracy: for instance, the movie's choppy editing results in a rather uneven pace and for every visually appealing frame there is one that feels even clumsily shot. Ultimately it is neither a great biopic nor a great film, but Jessica Lange's incendiary, showstopping performance ...