Mister Lonely (2008)

hyped garbage

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

While, it might not be the greatest movie of all time and the plot might be so out there that the mass audience wouldn't get or understand it. There is something about this movie; that has me liking it. Mister Lonely is directed and written by Harmonie Korine. It's an underrated yet innovative and creative story coming from the same guy who wrote 1995's 'Kids' script. The guy is very clever and witty in what he does. His other works are variants on this. While Korine's past films have always been about raw ugliness transcending into something beautiful. In my opinion, it's a hit or miss. He is a director to try and make his films overtly experimental and anti-mainstream, that's why I think his experimentation in film fails most of the time. They are so immersed in his own confused ideas that end up just being too pretentious. So I don't find him to be a great filmmaker. I didn't like his other films 2009's Trash Humpers or 1997's Gummo, but this is different from them because it's easier to watch. Mister Lonely is about a young American Michael (Diego Luna) living in Paris, making a living as a Michael Jackson lookalike impersonator. Diego Luna is an incredible Mexican actor with great physical performance, because he's obviously a great dancer. While, I think he's great, I might if a stronger actor had been given this part, it would have a stronger following. By co-incidence, he meets another impersonator named Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) who lives in an imitator commune in Scotland with her French husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and her daughter Shirley Temple (Esme Creed-Miles who in real life is really Samantha Morton's daughter). Samantha Morton is outstanding as Marilyn. I love her response to his question so how long have you been Marilyn and she says since I got my boobs. Very bold answer. it sounds so sexy and different. Others residents include The English Pope (James Fox), Italian Queen of England (Anita Pallenberg), and a James Dean from Wales (James Morgan). Also living there are; Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), Madonna (Medita Morgan) and Sammy Davis JR. (Jason Pennycooke). There are numerous other celebs lookalike that even more questionable like fictionist characters such as Red Riding Hood (Harmonie's wife Rachel Korine) and Buckwheat (Michael-Joel David Stuart) that makes you ask, why are they, there? Anyways, all of them are pretty great actors. At the commune, Michael and Marilyn prepare alongside her overzealous husband Charlie and a host of other impersonators for a star-studded stage show that will brighten and astonish their admirers, bringing them great fame. The first 15 minutes were great and then the story between Michael and Marilyn are thrown out the window. What follows is terrible filler scenes where the characters does not really do anything relate to the show. Then the story takes another odd turn, as the drama shifts to the Brazilian forest where a community of missionary nuns bring aid to the locals. While, on the airplane, a Nun fall out, and somehow survives the fall by praying. It was a miracle, and Latin American priest, Father Umbrillo (the legendary Director Werner Herzog) capitalize on it, and sent his missionary of nuns literally soar through the sky in search of their own answers. I like how Harmony Korine combines a skydiving nun on a BMX bike with a super poignant post rock song. I love the sound of the wind in this video as the nun is falling. I do like the movie soundtrack with "My Life" by Iris Dement, "Cheek to Cheek" by Fred Estaire and last Bobby Vinton - Mr. Lonely. I love the whole absurd meets poignant aspect of it. I wish you could find that in more movies! I thought it was hilarious, and poetic visually beautiful. Each frame is like a painting. There are a lot of dumb scenes; that was purposely done that way. A good example is the talking to the eggs scene. It has some clunky bits which feel awkwardly improvised but it was so wonderfully strange and very sad. It still upsets me to see the Three Stooges putting down the infected sheep even though you see nothing, nor need to. The story is funny and heartbreaking at the same time. Only Harmony Korine could weave Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, her daughter Shirley Temple, and flying nuns into a hypnotically funny and truly poignant tale of the instability behind fanaticism and the redemption we can hope to find in one another. I think the title Mr. Lonely doesn't work. I think 'The Impostors' might have been a better title and suited the dual plot line of the celebrity impersonators as well as the nuns who have the idea that they birds and can fly. It about a group of people trying to make a miracle out of their lives. The plot line which works around two seemingly unrelated narrative threads leaves something to be desired, and ends up being a strangely conventional film filled with outcasts in search of love and community. Overall: a good one time watch. It seems like one of those films where if you just go along with the ride even if it's a bit stupid.

I've slowly become a big fan of Harmony Korine for one reason or another. I understand he's not the greatest of directors to ever exist and many people will sit there and say to those who don't enjoy his films "you simply don't get him". I don't think there's much to get though, he has an odd idea and makes a film.Mister Lonely is different to his other films. For one, it has a story line. Films like Trash Humpers just didn't. Mister Lonely is pretty surreal and in some places, it's funny. Flying nuns on BMX bikes is so very odd. There's something hugely likable about this film though and it could be the different lives of each character. "Have you ever wanted to be someone else?" etcetc. This is people taking wanting to be someone else to the extreme. All the actors do a very good job of making their parts believable and for fans of Korine who haven't seen it - it is something different. But it does work.The only downside is, it is quite slow going and at times a little bit pointless. But watch it if you get the chance, it's an interesting film to say the least.

Just got through watching this and had to comment on how wonderful it is. I am a big fan of Harmony Korine but if I hadn't known he had made this, I would have never guessed it was his film (I probably would have guessed John Sayles first).So many amazing sequences in this film--the first Flying Nun sequence is unbelievable and I cannot get it out of my mind, brilliantly edited. The "Singing Egg" sequence almost had me crying and I don't normally get choked up. The stage show was also very poignant. And Werner Herzog's performance was pitch perfect.I normally don't gush over movies, but Mister Lonely was so original, I need to gush. My one peccadillo? Not sure the title fits the movie.(P.S. I hate critics and the ones on Rotten Tomatoes who called this a chore to sit through suck the most).

Harmony Korine - he strips the audience into camps that get ravenous at each other. I remember being in film school and knowing people who *loved* Gummo, loved it to death (one girl even did an homage picture of herself like the one boy with his face turns to the side in profile), and would defend it with... I don't know what logic, that (in good argument) that Korine had a vision, that he had a great eye at such a young age (21 or 22) at the outcasts of the world. Fine. Then on the other camp, people *hated* the work of him, couldn't stand it, couldn't get it. Understandable as well: Gummo is, I should add, a freak-show, Jerry Springer shot with the camera of Sven Nykvist on holiday. As for Julien Donkey Boy, well, that's a whole other story.The reason perhaps that I have a whole paragraph about Korine's reputation is that Mister Lonely, his latest film, is also his first in over eight years. Whatever it was that spurred him and his brother Avi to get to work on this after such a hiatus from the director's chair is beyond me, but it is admittedly nothing else if not fascinating - both in how it works wonders and charms and, frankly, how it can bore and act like it's God's gift to the lives of celebrity impersonators. It's the kind of film where things happen but they kind of don't at the same time; it has Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) and Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) meet in Paris, Monroe takes Michael to a Scottish castle where a family of celebrity impersonators (i.e. Chaplin, Stooges, Buckwheat, the Pope, the Queen) all are gathered to do... what? Well, put on a show for the locals, perhaps, even if they don't show up much, at all.And in the meantime, Werner Herzog - yes, Werner Herzog, stay tuned - is in the picture as a Latin American priest who has a plane full of nuns dropping rice on villagers and then, shock of shocks, one of the nun falls out of the plane and can fly. This may be, for me, one of the only times I can remember when Herzog has been not used to his full potential on screen. Perhaps there's a symbolic/Christian/belief connection that I did not get at all, but the rhythm of film-making that Korine had suddenly would shift gears every so often to this unrelated-to-the-celebrity-people to Herzog and the nuns (at one point Herzog, with big goggle/glasses on, rambles on camera about this or that, which usually is enormously gratifying but here is not), and it's as if we're plopped into one of Herzog's docu-fiction films filled with ecstatic truth. This would be fine - if there was *more* of this throughout the film, which there isn't (I'd say %10 of the running time has Herzog and/or flying nuns), or if they had been used for a whole other project and Korine had focused on just the family of celebrities.And yet, it's hard for me not to recommend the picture on some gut-level. There is invention here, and daring, and some kind of intuition with a personal aesthetic that makes Mister Lonely come alive in some unpredictable ways. But on the flip-side to Korine's inspirational coin are some hard truths to face: he finds all of this so self-important, so much like we're seeing something that we *must* find amazing and deep that he gets ahead of his own material. Some scenes end up rambling, others like Marilyn Monroe dancing slowly to herself and then it fading to black and the words "Thriller" streaming across the scene are beautiful and totally perplexing and pretentious in one fell swoop. There's also something of an easy out with the tragic part after the big performance is given (I wont mention it as it is a good spoiler), and it too leads to a conclusion that has some meaning but not enough. Some of this is very funny (hard not to laugh at cussing Abe Lincoln or smelly Pope), some of it weird in a good way... and some of it may make you wonder why you rented it in the first place.Again, as with Gummo, Mister Lonely will divide it's audience (frankly, I'm sort of divided among my own thoughts), but if you need that challenge of a director saying "this is what celebrity, the idea of being someone or doing something you care about that has f***-all to do with the rest of 'ordinary' humanity", or just some remarkable cinematography with art-house tattooed on its eyelids, check it out. If it's a disappointment, it was worth a shot. And if it's the best movie of the year, well, more power to you.