Highly Overrated But Still Good

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I have resisted Greenaway's insistence on nudity for his performers almost from the beginning but he was right and I was wrong, because I was thinking in stage terms and he in visual-art terms. I misunderstood Helen Mirren exposing her amazing breasts in The Cook, Juliette Stevenson her steel-spring body in Drowning by Numbers, Joan Plowright's refusal to bare all in the same film, John Gielgud's courageous self-exposure in Propero's Books. When one performs for Greenaway, one crosses a threshold, one leaves the stage and enters the frame. I still do not know if he is a great artist but my opinion is irrelevant, he is a necessary one for our time. I salute him.

Ben: I can't begin to tell you how much I admire your work here. Your dancing, the music, and visuals all fit together in a most creative manner. I have taught film for the past 20 years, and have always presented Greenaway as one of the greatest (if not the greatest) of our time. He is so complex and abstract that many don't get it, and most don't bother to try. The drama (which is always well made in his films) is never the point. It is the feeling that we get through his creative blending of characters, visuals, and music that is always what he seems to be going for. After all, he is a painter, and approaches film from a painter's point of view, and an abstract painter at that. We can observe the quiet death of opera, ballet, and the concert hall over the 2nd half of the century, and see film take over as the leading art form to include music. This incredible ballet, of which you are so much a part, is without question one of the finest ballets of the 2nd half of the century, all the more important as it has been preserved on film. Thank you so very much for your outstanding contribution here. You are a very great artist, my friend; and like many before you, misunderstood by most.

Well I only just found this stuff about my work on this film. Firstly I Choreographed this in Collaboration with P.Greenaway and L.Andriessen. So its not Greenaways attempt at Choreography, however I must say he is the only Director I have worked with who kept all of the material I made (I expected it to get cut or chopped up into smaller bit's just like so many other projects I did with Film Directors, before.) When I first read the treatment all I could see was ..Pink Narcisuss..'Wild Mozartness'!!.For me the sequential line of the music that dictated the order of movement making it look like a live piece, which I think Greenaway transformed into a marvelous spectacle. I agree that to understand this work, homework it's necessary to understand the reference's. The mob (audience)...The Spectacle(Versalius amphitheater)...Alchemist gods flippantly creating the alphabet, a man and then Mozart. The accentuation of geometry within the dance but also the overtness and intended banality of it all, coupled with the ultimate idea that these phenomenal artist's are often dead before they are famous, the implications therefore on the critical mob of people who have never done it?.., Art itself.. but have the power to dictate other peoples careers. Question to the negative people; Do you think the solo dances are really that ridiculous.....? can you see the Cunningham references, also the clarity of the Balletic. Do you think this is so easily done.? It strikes me as a harsh and uninformed comment. But I guess thats the nature of the Mob! B is for Ben.

I'm not familiar with Greenaway's other work; I mostly experienced this for Louis Andriessen's score (I'm a fan, and this isn't his best work, but it does have its moments). As for the film itself, let me say this: I like difficult art, and difficult cinema. I spend many hours justifying the existence of difficult art to others who are not quite so adventurous. I enjoy emotional distance and ambiguous meaning, taken even to Euro-trash extremes. And yet, I found this film to be the worst, most pretentious piece of crap I've ever seen in my life. It is very unattractive visually, and the film has dated very, very poorly in terms of its overall look. (Yes, you can tell this was made for TV...) Greenaway never knows when to get out of the way and let the images just breathe on their own... there is far too much information on screen at all times. If a first run through his completely awful text (which might pass as "edgy prose" in my junior high diary), set to Andriessen's music, wasn't enough for you, don't worry... he'll display the whole thing from start to finish in a slow side-scroll that features such high-tech effects as digitally-generated drop shadow. And his attempts at "choreography" are so banal in spots that you'll want to laugh out loud. Now I absolutely have to see another Greenaway film to see if they're all this bad. As for yourself, don't bother.