It is a cliché to suggest that Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood.
Sure, quite often these are celebratory meditations on how great Tinseltown is – Argo was the story of how Hollywood saved the lives of Americans caught up in the Iranian Revolution; Hitchcock celebrated the making of Psycho. Sometimes these are more cynical and jaded explorations of how Hollywood works, seeking to expose the community’s seedy underbelly to the world – Robert Altman’s The Player remains the definitive example, but films like What Just Happened probably count as well.
These stock Hollywood-story-about-Hollywood are the weakest aspects of Maps to the Stars. The movie often feels like it’s trying too hard to add a surface gloss of what people expect from a film about Hollywood, on top of a much more interesting and compelling tale of dysfunction and decay. Maps to the Stars is held together by a rake of terrific performances and a wonderfully creepy central metaphor, but it feels let down by the more superficial elements of the script.
We’re all in the gutter…
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: celebrity, cronenberg, david cronenberg, film, hollywood, horror, john cusack, Julianne Moore, maps to the stars, Mia Wasikowska, Movies, non-review review, review | 4 Comments »
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