Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Roedy Green Star must have been a very expensive movie to make. There are thousands of opulent costumes and sets. Almost every scene is bursting with extras in posh period dress.It is mostly a long string of stage performances. Julie Andrews is her usually amazing self with the surprise her skills include acrobatic dancer with snake-like grace.Gertrude Lawrence is a flip character, so the glue between the stage numbers about her private life is somewhat superficial. She tends to have several men on the go at once. This shocked audiences at the time the film was made, so they skirted the issue of sex rather prudishly.It is kind of like a 40-course dinner of exquisite French pastries. The movie is too long. It would have worked much better if pared down to standard length.Daniel Massey plays a young Noel Coward. He is great fun and quite believable.

Wizard-8 "Star!" was one of the most notorious financial bombs of the 1960s, the main reason probably being that when it was released the public was getting tired of musicals. Certainly, the movie itself has some faults that may not have attracted some audiences. The movie is both too long and not long enough, for one thing. It's kind of tough to sit through a movie that's almost three hours long. And curiously, despite this long running time, the portrait of Gertrude Lawrence seems unfinished. We don't really get to see what is driving this woman. And her personal life is only lightly looked at, such as the fact that while she had a daughter, this daughter character has hardly any time devoted to her.But the movie also has its share of strengths. The performances are very good, the strongest being that of (no surprise) Julie Andrews. She puts so much enthusiasm into her role that it does help make up for her somewhat shallowly written character. And the musical numbers sprinkled throughout are indeed excellent, with some great choreography mixed in as well. Fans of movie musicals will probably embrace this movie the best, but the movie does have some genuine appeal to other people as well, if they are patient enough to sit through almost 180 minutes of film that isn't perfect.

Goingbegging Even as The Sound of Music was winning its Academy Award, someone asked Julie Andrews what she would most wish for next. She said she'd like a re-make of the previous year's winner, My Fair Lady, but with herself in Audrey Hepburn's role as flower-girl turned aristocrat, which of course, Andrews had made famous on Broadway in the Fifties. Well, we could say she got her wish.This film biography of Gertrude Lawrence leans far too much weight on the social-climbing theme, which had become simply stale and irritating in the wake of the huge Sixties shake-up. Equally stale is the insertion of faked black-&-white newsreel clips, which are supposed to carry the story in-between the songs. This might have worked, if anyone had heard of the late Gertrude Lawrence, which millions hadn't. And a script like weak lemonade just added to the sense of anti-climax, which brought the unthinkable - a Julie Andrews flop.The film was (and is) notable only for the musical numbers, though the choice of songs is patchy. The words of Noël Coward's first hit 'Parisian Pierrot' probably didn't mean much even in 1923, though the melody showed more of the young man's promise. 'My Ship' hadn't weathered well, a contrived job by Ira Gershwin, impossible to sing with conviction, though he does better with the athletic 'Poor Jenny'. Best by far is 'Limehouse Blues', a brilliant staging of the Chinese drug-den sequence, lean and spare, far superior to the other extravagant scenes with which 20th-Century Fox were trying to buy their way to a hit.Songs apart, then, what are we left with?Julie Andrews acting as a full-blooded woman for the first time (truly startling as the drug-whore). Daniel Massey as Coward, his real-life godfather and patron, for which he was nominated for an award, though he sometimes seems unsure whether he is acting or just impersonating. Some wooden performances by the star's various escorts, except for the much-eclipsed first husband, played convincingly by the Yorkshireman John Collin. An interesting glimpse of Jenny Agutter as the school-age daughter, and a quaint cameo of Bruce Forsyth. But otherwise just a lot of more-or-less agreeable escapism, which failed to win audiences, because it was a few years too late and simply lacking in edge.

Cristian Star! (1968)Directed by Robert WiseStarring Julie AndrewsMusical biography of actress Gertrude Lawrence tries to be entertaining but it's sometimes unnecessary lenght makes it sometimes yawning, but the main problem is the lost focus of the plot. The movie have it's songs for sure, and Andrews is terrific, but the movie passed in front your eyes. The team who brought you "The Sound of Music" surely want this to be a big hit ... but this never happen. In spite of that, is worth seeing for that last big musical number - Choreographed by Michel Kidd-.