The Moderns

source: The Moderns

The Moderns

Pretentious fluff with great music (some contemporary to the plot and some nice incidental stuff from Mark Isham). Contains a lot of posing from the stars, who do their best to enliven stiff dialogue (come on, do we REALLY think Hemingway walked around talking in spare and taciturn sentences such as he wrote?). Did I mention the soundtrack is great? Oh, yeah. Sorry; it just really stands out in this mess.

Sometimes the romantic subplot gets in the way of the satire, but when you see Hemingway drooling and mumbling into his scotch and hear Gertrude Stein recite one of her interminable doggerels masquerading as an unassuming philosophical gem, you know they can't be too serious. One of the greatest lines in any movie comes near the end, when Wallace Shawn says to Keith Carradine: "I ran into Maurice Ravel in the men's room. He didn't recognize me." I love these early 20th century "period" films, and The Moderns is double the fun-no real suicides, and a hopeful, happy ending.

A nice film to look at but otherwise a real piece of trash which I avoided up till now. The characters all seem to be from different cultures & from different eras which really is jarring, particularly in the 1960s - 1970s laid-back style of Carradine. The Stein/Toklas salon is a one-dimensional embarrassment. The Hemingway portrayal is a disaster on every level. The principals on this film must have really hated him. Only John Lone & Linda Fiorentino give the film any tension or dimension. Even Genevieve Bujold, an otherwise fascinating actress, is totally wasted in this pathetically boorish Rudolph effort.

A fan of the time period and its characters will be disappointed in this story. At moments, the movie trues to capture Paris in 1926 but falls shorts with endless empty performances, motivations, acting, narrative and background. Carradine is flat beyond measure as he portrays an unlikeable, dull, dead on arrival character. Yes, this is the lost generation, but the protagonist is neither here or there. Wallace Shawn and Kevin O'Connor bring a much needed departure from this failure of a story but it is still not enough to make sense of this movie. Linda Fiorentino's rawness is breathtaking and worth sitting through2 hours of emptiness. A great potential of a film, that falls short to being above water as the movie continues to sink as you watch.

The sets and costumes for this movie are often very impressive. Some of the photography is very good. There are some fine actors here. Yet this is one of the worst movies I have ever seen! Why? It's the script and, to the extent one can tell, the director, who didn't know what to do with this awful script. But mostly it's the script. It is stilted beyond belief. Characters do things with no apparent motivation. The character of Hemingway keeps spouting lines that have no connection to anything else, and that often don't mean anything. (If you've seen Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, that only makes some of the similar scenes here look that much worse.) How, I kept wondering, did this script get approved? And why did MGM release this? Take my word for it, it's one truly awful movie.

This is a fairly enjoyable tale set in the art world of 1920s Paris. The look of the film and the mood it creates are the most important things; far more important than the enjoyable, yet slow-moving plotline. It is highly imaginative and its representation of icons such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein add an extra dimension to the film. The only true weak points are some of the dialogues between the two leads; it is sometimes out of place and almost too 'modern'! All the performances are good but John Lone and Keith Carradine are especially suited to their parts.

This movie came to my public library on DVD. It seemed interesting, I watched it. Keith Carradine is Nick Hart, expatriate painter in Paris. He finds it hard making a living as a legitimate painter, and hires himself out to duplicate two Cezane paintings. Does the customer eventually get the originals, or the duplicates? Linda Fiorentino was only in her late 20s and cute as Rachel Stone. We see all of her in some racy scenes in the bathtub with her possessive lover. In this period piece we see a number of characters famous for the period. I suppose they were living a very "Modern" lifestyle, thus the name of the movie. While mostly enjoyable, with multiple story lines, I do not give it a very high recommendation.