WARNING: SOME CONTENT MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR EMPLOYMENT
So, Lady Gaga gets nominated for playing Janice Joplin but Natalie Portman gets the statue for playing Lady Gaga?
As our fallen idol Troll Prince The White commented before he turned in his 2018 ballot:
“It’s all very meta. We love that. It makes us look smart. Mainly to each other, but you get the idea.”
That’s what this is and there is not much else to say about it.
VOX LUX begins in 1999 when teenage sisters Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) and Eleanor (Stacy Martin) survive a seismic, violent tragedy. The sisters compose and perform a song about their experience, making something lovely and cathartic out of catastrophe — while also catapulting Celeste to stardom. By 2017, the now 31-year-old Celeste (Natalie Portman) is mother to a teenage daughter of her own and struggling to navigate a career fraught with scandals when another act of terrifying violence demands her attention.
Movies about celebrity are extremely hard to pull off unless you:
- Make it a full on “rags to riches” story like A Star Is Born or
- Give us an analog of ourselves who we share the journey with as he descends into that decadent and depraved world ala Almost Famous.
The logline makes it sound as if they are going with option #1, but the trailer tells another story altogether. Check it out:
From the beats in the trailer it looks like the majority of the movie is going to focus on decadent and depraved angle, so who is our guide?
Jude Law? Who really cares. I’m not going to see this movie. Neither are you unless it’s on a date. I only posted this so Wolves would stop bugging me.
No way this is anything other than navel-gazing Oscar bait.
No way Non-Actress Natalie will turn in a performance in this movie or —let’s be honest — in her career to ever top what Lady Gaga did in A Star Is Born.
Lady Gaga herself is just a more interesting character than anything that they could ever invent in Vox Lux, with it’s trite double “violent incidents”.
All that being said, we can’t downgrade Miss Portman too much… after all, she did give us this singularly spectacular view:
