Linbeymusol
Wonderful character development!
AshUnow
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Ezmae Chang
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
lasttimeisaw
Sofia Coppola's fourth feature, the controversial Venice's Golden Lion winner (as the head of jury that year was her ex Quentin Tarantino), SOMEWHERE, promulgates Coppola's aesthetic credo right in its first shot, a static shot patiently observing a black Ferrari running in circles on the race track in the desert, four circles later, our protagonist, a listless Hollywood personage Johnny Marco (Dorff) steps out, which heralds a standstill he cannot escape and suggests that a soupçon of forbearance is a sine qua non during the viewing process. While a privileged life (with all its Tinseltown trappings) is vested to Johnny, a Hollywood movie star in his prime, he is, perversely, stricken by anhedonia and acedia, and Coppola's close-quarters camera watches his numb status at lengths but has little intention to vamp up the subject's tediousness and banality (sporadically, two voluptuous pole-dancing twins, an uncanny spell of dead silence when Johnny is latex-covered for his makeup transmogrification, plus a homoerotic massage incident, are the zenith in terms of its narrative conceit), a method one might extol for its pseudo-documentary resolution, but nevertheless, significantly cripples the film's essential watchablity, if you are not a fan of Stephen Dorff's bad-boy persona, chances are it would be a long 98 minutes to while away. That dreadful mundaneness are potentially alleviated when Johnny's 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Fanning) comes into the scene, cute as a bunny, a sylph-like Cleo obligingly brings a whiff of vitality and sensibility to Johnny's empty life and through their resultant bonding time (including an award-collecting jaunt to Rome, which is beneficial to both the movie's rhythm and a viewer's diminishing attention span), a palatable tonal shift engenders and leads us to Johnny's tearful confession of his existential crisis near the end, though, Coppola doesn't coddle him with any easy solution in return, ergo, he must extricate himself off his own bat, and the ending can be read as an ouroboros to the beginning, stepping out and heading on, there might be still hope left for him anyway. Taken from a distinctive male perspective, Coppola's meditative account of an ennui-overlapped individual deliberately and artfully sidelines plot development in favor of an understated mood of detachment that is bespoke of her central character, but the end product is still a snooze-fest stuck in the middle of the road, with little sparks fly.
farmgirl-81805
Not only is there almost no dialogue, which is made even duller by long boring spans of people you know next-to nothing about do NOTHING, but then, in the end... NOTHING.
sander-dammann
Somewhere is after The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation the third movie I saw from director Sofia Coppola. It was a success like those movies before it. Somewhere is not good because of the story, but because of the characters and their actors.We get to know the characters by little clues. It is a less is more movie, and I like those kind of movies. The protagonist, played by Stephen Dorff. I knew him especially from Blade. He played very good I liked him in this movie. Elle Fanning played maybe even better. She acted very naturally. Like I said before, I liked those kind of movies. The structure of the movie is very slow, but the movie has compelling characters and is beautifully shot. The soundtrack was pretty awesome too. Julian Casablancas' song was a highlight of the movie. It fitted perfectly in the movie. Well done.
Leila Cherradi
This movie is good for anyone interested in acting. In the reality of acting. Not the lies (dreams) that are usually given to us to feel good. Or just stoned. No. Here is indeed a film that seems boring. It seems so boring that when it ends you may wonder what you've been looking at. And I guess that's the expected effect. Y'see, what is usually sold to us is that actors lead a wonderful life, just because they get money and a job that sustains their ego. But doesn't a 'wonderful' life depend on what acting you do? On what kind of movie you do for a living? and why? I won't spoil the movie. But this movie is a good movie. It is a movie that stops the illusion that actors are somehow living on a better planet. They're not. And there is a perversion in this society about actors, showing them as more important or interesting than a lambda person, even more intelligent, so intelligent that we would ask serious questions about the world to an actor. Again, certain actors are intelligent, others are less... That movie, as well as 'Ellie Parker' that I just saw, is a movie that may ask us : why the hell are we so deluded by the cinematographic medium and what do we wanna eat for movies? I would add a little precise note to end this critic : someone here criticized certain scenes for showing a not so well done activity, but the way that activity is showed is just the way I can imagine it would be if I saw it in reality. And that shows that we are so trained to nice pictures,nice prestations, as if everyone always has to be perfectly dressed,haired, has to make all perfect moves, etc. We don't like to look at reality!
