Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

GRAND PIANO (2013)

It sounds like a fun little thriller: Talented, but traumatized, classical pianist has his comeback concert short-circuited when a mystery man threatens to shoot him mid-concerto if he plays a single wrong note! Alas, we’ll never know if this DRIVE meets PHANTOM OF THE OPERA mash-up could work since the execution from scripter Damien Chazelle & megger Eugenio Mira is pure amateur hour. (So too the film’s ‘original’ piano concerto by Victor Reyes, a wan pastiche of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Mantovani, Ferrante & Teicher.) Even if you go along with gaffes like no rehearsal, having the grand placed behind the orchestra or the unintentionally hilarious stadium-style public-address introductions (‘Ladies & Gentlemen! Please welcome tonight’s conductor!’), when’s the last time you saw a classical soloist playing off his music score? Didn’t that turn unfashionable with Liszt? Then again, not even Liszt could simultaneously send text via cell phone, converse on Blue-Tooth and be note perfect! Lucky John Cusack gets to (literally) phone-it-in as a dastardly off-screen voice. But the idiocies hardly abate for Wood, spiffy in his cummerbund, dashing off-stage for instructions in the middle of the first movement; or having our prick of a primo uomo conductor stop to deliver a not-so funny speech between the first & second movements. Heck, let's have intermission between the second & third movement since Wood is off someplace again. Obviously, no one involved in this thing has ever been to a classical concert . . . it’s likely they’ve never been to a movie.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Is Elijah Wood aging into a youngish Brad Dourif?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: For a classical music thriller that doesn’t insult your intelligence, try John Brahm’s HANGOVER SQUARE/’45 with Bernard Herrmann’s stunning mini-concerto finale.

No comments: