Maps to the Stars (2014)

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

A tour into the heart of a Hollywood family chasing celebrity, one another and the relentless ghosts of their pasts. Maps to the Stars is another weird looking movie from director David Cronenberg but unlike Cosmopolis this film has a cast of great actors and yet they are getting wasted in this black comedy, satire of a film that goes nowhere with the only actor being really good is Julianne Moore but besides that everyone else is just there John Cusack is a jerk in the whole film, Robert Pattinson is kind of the same, Olivia Williams is kind of a mixed bag and Evan Bird alongside Mia Wasikowska are just weird and insane. Wanna see a great Cronenberg film? Go watch The Fly it has great actors, performances and story 5/10.

The title gives an impression of someone lost in somewhere and trying to find a way back home. I did not know what this film was about. I did not know who stars in it and when it released. But I decided to watch it at the last minute without checking out its synopsis and I ended up satisfied. Not fully pleased, but the refreshing story and its characters interested me.This is an unusual drama that takes place in a district where the Hollywood people are dominated. Our tale opens with a young woman arriving there and soon gets an opportunity to become a famous artist's personal assistant. The film also focuses others tales, so it is a multi layered story. But all of them are somewhere connected; particularly at the end. Revealing everyone's agenda behind their act is what brings the conclusion to the tale.Not neatly told story, yet different. I would say futuristic theme. I liked the performances. Robert Pattinson was not in a major role, but the other like Mia Wasikowska, Julianne Moore were good. Revolving around the bunch film celebrities means there's no real ones involved with the real names, just mentioned the names who were not in the film. Hard to predict the story, I was not sure until it revealed itself everything at the end. That part was a quite a shock, not I expected, but that's the real twist. Overall film was decent, slightly it missed to be a great. I feel it is worth a watch if you want something new in the story.6.5/10

I gave this film 3 stars for the earnestness of Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska, otherwise it was nothing short of an overwrought, self- indulgent mess. Maybe Hollywood insiders would find these characters intriguing, but for me I could not relate, nor care less about them and their family dramas. And I enjoyed several other Cronenberg films, just not this crap. Perhaps I'm being overly critical because I recently watched and thoroughly enjoyed the thought-provoking Clouds of Sils Maria with Juliette Binoche and Kristin Stewart. This film handled the subject of an actress having to come to grips with how age changes the game within the industry, particularly for women, with subtlety and finesse. Maps to the Stars hit you over the head with overacting, and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink situations including ghosts, threesomes, drug addictions, pyromania, etc, etc etc. Too much over-the-top craziness for my taste. And do I need to mention a completely ridiculous caricature performance from John Cusack? Ugggghhh, spare me.

I can't remember the last time I saw a look at the world of Hollywood and just downright ego as awful as Maps to the Stars. I mean that as a compliment though; this could go one of two ways quite possibly, as being just tawdry melodrama like a soap opera, or into such terrain that aside from the characters being unlikable (which is not an inherently bad thing) it becomes boring. The latter of these was a problem on David Cronenberg's previous film, Cosmopolis, where I didn't give a s*** about the characters even in the satirical setting. But what makes Maps to the Stars for me such a captivating experience is that these are people in some earth-bound reality, but they are for the most part consumed by their own sense of self-worth either due to their pasts and legacy in Hollywood (Julianne Moore's Havana with her deceased star mother; John Cusack as a best-selling kooky New-Age-like author), or those who are getting subsumed by it or those around (Evan Bird's young actor character Benjie, and his beleaguered mother played by Olivia Williams).It's a complicated film in ways that include it being a ghost story. By this I don't mean Paranormal Activity or in some 'Gotcha' kind of spooktacular thing. This is more like, if I can think back to anything, like during a play when there are ghosts that appear to characters on stage to haunt them in a more existential/familial sense (the closest I can compare it to are the few moments in Fanny & Alexander where the father's ghost appears). While the characters in this story, eventually revolving around the reappearance of Mia Wasikowska's character Agatha, who was away for years after starting a fire and nearly killing her family (Cusack, Williams, Bird), it's a strange mixture of just cutting, acidic satire on not so much the industry but what it does to people's self-worth - the parts to obtain, ageism, sex appeal, who's f***ing who over - and also with this sense of other spiritual beings messing with Benjie and Havana.I think what struck me the most was how straightforward Cronenberg presents these ghosts. They're there, we know they're not really there, and the only predictable thing is that, once or twice of course, reality blends into the un-reality in fatal ways. There are a few instances the movie gets bloody, and almost kind of savage (when a gun goes off in a particular scene it's almost to a point of 'Why?' but that's the point and it's a savage moment). But this is more about how the characters cope with the world around them, whether it's Pattinson's chauffeur, the one sort of outsider who is trying to break in as an actor, or of course Moore as this completely vulnerable but extremely, shall one say, 'clever' about the business and what it does to a person. I wonder if Moore would've played it the same had the original plan gone through, which was to make the film 10 years prior; Moore looks spectacular for her age, any age, but maybe ten years ago it wouldn't be as believable she wouldn't get the part because of this or that reason having to do with looks, which is the subtext here.A large part of why this film works rests on the acting I think. Cronenberg's direction is sure-footed here and he goes a long way to find the little human moments between characters in the midst of what is a very bleak and dark world where business meetings have a detached air (and notice how often Cronenberg shoots singles on actors, that is we often don't get a full wide view of a room or who's in it, people feel disconnected as they have to talk and look at one another, like they're in different spaces in the same space). But I think this is a case where the script probably read one way, and the actors give it a kind of extra life and lift, so that Moore and Wasikowska and even Cusack, who plays basically a self-promoting, pseudo-psychcic BS artist, and gives them dimension. We may not like them, but that's not the point. I think if you can find these people interesting enough, even when they do some really terrible things, it can pull you through.The ending starts to get... too weird, if that's possible for a Cronenberg film, but more in a subtle, quiet way than you'd see in his early work, maybe even disquieting, how two characters in particular end up together. For the most part, I felt in capable hands in a filmmaker and screenwriter who were attempting to experiment with expectations on how people who we know are human beings have become or could become monstrous, whether they're thirteen years old or middle-aged. And Evan Bird, the one principal actor I didn't know well, gives this character an air that makes him probably the least likable of all - the arrogant adolescent "star" actor - but doesn't make him cartoonish or too broad. There's deeper things going on under the surface here, even if it can't really be totally seen all the time; it's the kind of black-death-comic look at Hollywood (and needless to say some of this dialog is quite funny when it's not dramatic or just weird) that would make a helluva double bill with Barton Fink.