By the Sea

My thoughts on By the Sea can be summarized in a single scene where Brad shakes Angelina while repeating, "What are you doing?" over and over again.

Fifty Shades of Beige...

This movie is too slow, confusing & boring. I kept asking myself how it was possible for a movie starring Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie could be so incredibly dull. I kept expected it to pick up, or at least provide a somewhat decent ending. I also hated that there was so much spoken French. I came close to giving up on it several times, but they included just enough bread crumbs to string me along for one more scene. The long slow burn does not have a satisfying conclusion. The writing is abysmal.

Pretensions to opening as a Greek tragedy, set in France, which looks like Italy, but is actually at the stunningly beautiful Mgarr ix-Xini Bay in Gozo, Malta. Jolie's character appears to be taking pills for depression (and most of the movie [i]is[/i] depressing) which later turns out to be not clinical. But they've come to this place to try to work out their problems even though she refuses to talk about "it". In another setting with another couple this would have been a total dud, but bet [Full review]

A Tragically Beautiful and Wealthy couple (Brad and Angelina) go to the kind of French fishing village which exists mostly for TBW people to have their existential crises in, and become wrapped up with a newlywed couple (Melanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) whom they are spying upon. At times bordering on self-parody, it picks up midway through and threatens to become a nice psycho-drama before settling back into soapiness. Jolie's direction is pretty good, but her writing falls well short.

Viewed April 15, 2020.

Not bad.

Vanity project by Jolie is slow-paced and slight, but damn the Mediterranean setting is beautiful

this movie with world famous couple Brangelina starring as a troubled couple directed by Angelina Jolie, is clearly influenced by Antonioni movies and other 60 European arthouse movies. The movie is at it best when it just focuses on two tragic figures separately coping in their own way with a tragedy that drifted them apart. The movie does give a good sense of feeling of apathy. The movie falters when it tries to explains these feelings and reason behind the estrangement.

Vanity project by Pitt and Whatshername

Writer-director Angelina Jolie's attempt to emulate European art cinema is a slow, sodden, stupefyingly dull take on a 1970s marriage gone bad. Jolie plays Nessa, and her husband, Brad Pitt, is Nessa's husband, Roland. The Pitts, it must be said, suffer gorgeously. Vacationing at a swank hotel in Malta, they spy through a peephole at newlyweds next door. Nessa and Roland barely talk. When they finally do, you pray they'll shut up. "I smell fish" Nessa says, sniffing. Nah What stinks is the movie

Slow but I didn't get bored. Thought provoking.

The classicism is magnificent, the rhythms smoothly subterranean, the actors into it, the actors' hair into it, and still it's 20 min too long, the characters under-written for such an ordeal, and the reveal superfluous. So all of Jolie's power and beauty become a double-edged sword because nobody told her what needs to be done. I still like the film's Mediterranean languor though. It's out of time, and up my alley.

jolie's pretentious self-mythologising mood piece lounges in the space between creation & consumption, performance & audience, 'til analogies between marriage, art & celebrity emerge. while too literal at times, it's also bold & risky, fascinating beyond near anything else this year whenever it's just coldly, erotically, semi-ironically manipulating our gaze upon its glamorous and clichéd surfaces, paradoxically feeling more true/personal/painful than more direct modes of storytelling could.

There is a lot I like about By the Sea (2015). Feels like a very personal project for the Pitts. Would possibly worked better if they added some adult thriller elements. Didn't have to be much. Just a little dose of chills to give this childless marriage drama a stronger mood, for all it needed was for something more to happen.