Youth

If there ever was a trailer that could not sell his movie right, then it is the one for ''Youth'' by acclaimed director Paolo Sorrentino, who's previous film was the Oscar-winning ''The Great Beauty''. The trailer made it look like a generic feel-good comedy, but it turned out to be a heart-warming, emotional and beautiful film. The story takes place in a resort hotel in the Alps, where a retired conductor (Michael Caine) and his friend, a film director (Harvey Keitel) who writes the screenplay for his ''Testament'', are on holiday. Both are confronted with their past, future and momentariness. Both actors have a great supporting cast on their side, everyone with their own burdens: Rachel Weisz plays Caine's daughter who is also his assistant, who feels neglected by her father and, in an great emotional monologue, expresses her feelings towards him. Paul Dano plays a character actor who is only known for a single insignificant role and wants to be recognized as a versatile actor. Jane Fonda plays a Diva who was a regular collaborator with Keitel's character and also has a great dialogue scene with him. Other characters are a retired Maradonaesque football player and a masseuse who touches than talks and many other great characters. It would seem that all these ''damaged'' characters would give this film an overly sentimental tone, but drama and humor is so well balanced that the shift between comedy (and there is a lot of it) and drama never seems abrupt and doesn't interrupt the pacing of the film. From the first minute on one will clearly see what Sorrentinos strength as a director is: Extremely beautiful visuals. Whether it is just the landscape or the daily routine of the people within the hotel: Every frame is just beautifully composed and looks astonishing. Rarely can a film with a run time of 2 hours constantly produce one great looking shot after the other. In combination with the great score by David Lang, ''Youth'' creates a unique and relaxing atmosphere that will ensure a great time at the theater. As great as this movie may sound so far, it unfortunately is not flawless. As funny and great the dialogue is, at times it ruins the film completely with how unsubtle some of the important character moments are. In one scene, Caine and Dano are in a store and a little girl approaches Dano. She tells him that she knows him from a movie. He immediately assumes that she is referring to his robot role, but then she talks about a little known drama and tells him how it affected her life and instantly after her dialogue is finished she runs away with the camera facing Danos reaction so everybody in the audience knows that it was an important scene for his character. Another examples would be ham fisted lines like: ''What awaits me outside?'' -''Youth'' or the scene with the binocular from the trailer. The problem with these scenes is not that they are bad, on the contrary, they are important for the films' themes and characters. The problem is that they feel disconnected from the narrative and do not feel like they fit naturally within the plot.

I'm trying to think how I'm going to generate 10 lines about this spectacularly terrible film - certainly one of the worst I've ever seen. The only way this can have been financed is by its inclusion of two "bankable" stars - Harvey Keitel and Michael Caine. However what it was that attracted them to the script beats me. Nonetheless they manage - Michael Caine in particular - to give what must surely be the least convincing performances of their careers. Which is hardly surprising considering the portentous drivel that they have to spout. I've not bothered to look at anything about the team who made it but it has the feel of a vanity project authored by a group of wealthy film school graduates in their twenties who have minimal experience of life but who have seen a lot of European "art cinema". One recent film it reminded me of was "La Grande Belleza", the difference being that that film actually had some interesting ideas and strong performances. I stopped watching twice and had a hard time convincing myself to invest any more time on it; on the second occasion, a couple of minutes into the concertscene, about 15 minutes before the end (it feels almost interminable) I didn't bother to resume. Toward the end of this pretentious and totally unconvincing farrago there are a couple of extended expository monologues which attempt to plug the holes in the sieve which constitutes a plot. There's so much wrong with "Youth" it's impossible to find anything positive to say about it. To call it pretentious garbage would be to compliment it. The two star leads should be ashamed of themselves; they surely can't need the money.

Youth is 'an artsy movie'. This means that it has all artsy movie clichés, as follows: no structure (just a bunch of random scenes glued together with a duct tape), no characters (talking mannequins put in random places), no plot, no joy, no substance. It's just sad and insanely boring set of shots that vary from mildly annoying to flat out disgusting. Apparently it was supposed to be a study of aging. The movie presents a bunch of 'secondary characters' (young aspiring filmmakers, conductor's daughter, miss universe with disgusting silicon tits, queen's emissary, some young actor, a freaking buddhist monk) and it throws this interesting pack into beautiful hotel located in Alps to sit and talk about life and death. The main characters are 2 old farts. One grumpy ex - orchestra conductor and second retiring filmmaker. One is old and bitter and he doesn't want to perform anymore, because of some personal tragedy, the second is still kicking, but he eventually gives up too after one of his muses resigns from being in his last movie and the guy jumps off the balcony and I was supposed to care, but I didn't, because this movie was so disgusting and boring that I almost fell asleep halfway through it... I wouldn't be so negative if there was some artism included in this piece. But no, all we see are metaphores served with the subtlety of Mike Tyson knocking down his opponent, 80 years old penises, silicon breasts, old people in the pool, Hitler and jokes about urinating repeated 10 times throuought the movie. Boring, low impact piece of crap.

The actors are mostly fine,although I have never liked anything Paul Dano has done, but the dialogue is stilted pseudo intellectual absurdest, claptrap. I seldom feel so annoyed as this movie made me feel. What a waste of talent and time. It tries to manipulate the viewer but there is not one real moment in the whole bloated mess. I do not understand how it has a rating as high as it is, Of course as a small art film, it has probably had a certain type of self indulgent audience, who see what is not there. I have seen films that tried for something different,off kilter, or surprising, which were in some way successful, meaningful, and/or entertaining. This is not one of those films.

This film is about the emotional problems of very, very talented; very, very rich people. It features fake desire, fake spirituality, fake grief, fake love, fake friendship. The script is in English - that is to say, the words spoken are English words, but they seem to have been generated from Italian via free automatic translation. It managed to be both totally incredible and totally predictable. It might be the worst film I've ever seen. It is definitely the most pretentious. The photography is quite pretty. More lines of text are required... so I'll just say that Michael Caine does not make a convincing conductor, and that some of the musicians involved seemed appropriately embarrassed.