Jersey Boys

Remember when Jersey boy gets married than like an hour later you finally see his wife again and hes all of a sudden got 3 kids and you're meant to care about their family drama? Terrible editing and storytelling. An empty vessel.

1 complete slog through Italian stereotype nonsense for the first hour then another slog through medium shot hell. When the camera actually kinda moved around I shit my pants I was so startled. The last minute of this made me hate it because it was lively and entertaining. Of course this movie was made by a 100 year old man.

I cannot fathom how these guys got famous. Franki Valli sounds like a squirrel being tortured. And Eastwood - don't even get me started on Eastwood...

Proves that you don’t actually need an old cast of characters to feel like an elderly, decrepit-ass doddering movie for the nursing home rec room. I actually felt myself ordering a rocking chair and Murder She Wrote box set while watching this movie about music your grandparents listened to. On the plus side it was so fuckin’ Italian it inspired me to make some spaghetti after watching and that was way better than the movie

Something of a failure here, as a music Biopic, it's so very vanilla that everything but the songs are forgettable. Honestly, though, The Four Seasons had enough awesome songs that this movie was a long time coming, I just expected more, especially from Eastwood.

A handsomely mounted adaptation of the jukebox musical that ignores the typical beats, set pieces and celebratory tone of the genre in favor of a more complicated rise-and-fall story about brotherhood and the American dream. Truthfully, if you don't buy into the Frankie Valli myth - and I don't - you're likely to find at least some of it really goofy. Then again, the film is more of a brooding, anti-nostalgia trip than I assume the original show must be, and it's all the better for it.

I liked it. It's too long, it doesn't reach as deep as it should into Frankie Valli's soul, but one still does get to know these guys, while the reliably catchy tunes push it to the finish line.

Why Eastwood was chosen for this project is anyone's guess. Sure he directed Bird, but it was neither successful nor celebratory, so Eastwood's no frills approach naturally lent itself to the material. As far as nostalgic pop pieces go, Jersey Boys is an amiable time killer with decent songs and passable performances, but it lacks energy and a strong sense of style, and it compresses multiple significant events into a reduced timeline in a way that negatively affects our emotional involvement.

Long and did not go anywhere but good music

Material matched less to Eastwood's ear than late Eastwood's "lush-yet-rushed" style (c/o Adam Nayman), the shadows only visible so as to brighten the stagelights. Who could possibly give a shit otherwise?

Enjoyed this. Clint obviously had a lot of fun filming it. The music is great. A very cheeky cameo by Clint. Christopher Walken is awesome too.

I digged it. I'm still listening to the soundtrack.

Biopic of the story of the Four Seasons and Frankie Valli's struggle for success. Presents gritty details of their personal relationships that destroys the group. Franky is a stand up guy who takes on a huge debt to protect his friend. A good showcase of his musical career. Excellent performance from John Lloyd Young as Frankie. Huge diverse cast. Well made, entertaining and interesting throughout.

Jersey Boys is a film I enjoyed much more than most. I haven't seen the stage show, so I cannot comment on how faithful this adaption may or may not be. However I am a huge fan of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, so I thoroughly enjoyed all the music. But the acting is of mixed quality, there are pacing issues and tonally this adaption can't quite decide whether it wants to be a biopic or a musical. As expected though, Clint Eastwood's direction and cinematography is still visually impressive.

I do wish it had been more a more showy production like the stage musical, which is far and away the greatest jukebox musical ever written. However, it still manages to keep most of the interest. It's a bit too low-key, but the story itself doesn't suffer for it, and the leading performances are great.

Fairly uninspired, with the exception of Tom Stern's cinematography. The look he got evoked the '60's in the most uncanny way... by far the best thing about the movie.

I'm not really that familiar with Frankie Valli or The Four Seasons, apart from their big hits, so it was nice to learn about them. While this isn't the biopic, I quite enjoyed it. The music's great, of course, and the four leads worked well. Clint Eastwood's direction is fine, but perhaps not perfect for a movie like this. It could've used more of a sense of fun, and I'm not sure Eastwood has that. It's maybe a bit too long, but I had a good time with most of it.

Has same problem as the stage musical, in that it's a nice story without any kind of satisfying resolution. A stage show can get away with it though because it can finish on a good song & everyone goes away happy. That kind of lazy plotting in a movie leaves much to be desired. Some of the worst sections of the stage script are also verbatim transcripted & come across poorly on screen. Eastwood seriously needs to start employing better make-up artists too. Sounded really great though.

Quem tá falando que esse filme é medíocre só pode estar louco.

Pop biopics are dull enough if you follow the formula to a tee, but who on earth thought Eastwood's unwaveringly sober style (which made his "J. Edgar" as awful as it was) was a good match for a Broadway musical adaptation? There are moments of levity and the performances could be worse (Vincent Piazza is actually very good) but what a drag this film is. Eastwood in recent years has been satisfied with his films just being barely watchable and competent, but where the hell is the fun in that?

Jersey Boys can't decide if it's a biopic drama or a musical. It seems like Eastwood had to chose between great actors or great singers and got neither. It's not gritty and realistic enough for a mob drama. A forget-about-it here and there does not a gangster drama make. Ironically it's too gritty and realistic for a musical. Songs need to be more than concerts and white noise in the background. I love Frankie Valli and enjoyed the movie, but it never reached the heights of La Bamba or even Ray!

Mediocre...like most biopics. Better than "Ray" but falls way short of "La Bamba".

I didn't have high hopes for this, but the blend of jukebox vocal pop, classic gangster elements, and nostalgic Italian-American cultural ephemera really worked for me. I was grinning throughout; it's infused with a cheeky spirit, even amidst the gangster grit, that keeps things utterly watchable. It's a genuinely compelling story, the songs are classics, and the lead performances are uniformly great.

I was the only person under the age of 60 in the theater. I haven't been around so many old people since LAST VEGAS.

I have really mixed feelings about this one. The casting was awesome. Musical scenes were set up well without breaking the pace of the movie. It just felt so uneven at times, I was distracted away from the story. It felt like they were nobodies and suddenly they were somebodies. The characters narrating the story worked to explain what was happening, but the more the movie progressed, the more ill-fitting that feature grew.

What a weird and fascinating Eastwood-trainwreck. Nothing really makes sense in this soap opera universe, with some seriously bad singing and acting.

??????Dreamgirls????????????????????????????????/????????????Valli??????????Nicola?

The forced acting, dreadful narration and glossy cinematography underpin an air of artificiality that saturates the entire production, while the stunted flow of the narrative inhibits any engagement in the characters' tribulations. As such, it’s barely recognisable as an Eastwood picture, and frankly should never have been adapted for the big screen.

Good

60.50

6/7

Each performance so smothered in layers of bullshit. The crap age makeup at the end is a microcosm for the entire thing - who believes this? Who hasn't seen all of this before in every biopic ever made? Sucks, because the music is great. Eastwood's notoriously fast and sloppy way of shooting movies kills this and nearly every movie he's directed the past ten years. Sucks to suck.

The way to make a musical is to make it the way Clint has: The numbers are not interruptions. They're advancements, and enhancements. You're reminded of how much you love do-wop, but you become absorbed in the story of where it came from. We see how the talent and inspiration grew out of a life of strife, as it so often does. We see through the characters' rise to fame just how history evolves into myth, heightening the ecstatic nostalgia of the film's ultimate homage to its Broadway roots.

Seems like a fun stage musical.

Award worth performances and great songs are ruined by a script that didn't seem to cut ANYTHING out. Because of this the movie drags hard in the middle and the end. Also it's hard to tell the passage of time as only Frankie Vallie gets any semblance of aging make-up.

I love Jersey Boys as a musical, the movie is equally good if you're a fan of the Four Seasons. Though, I do prefer the original stage performance, check this one out.

Based as it is on a wildly successful Broadway show, perhaps director Clint Eastwood didn't have much of a choice. Moviemakers fiddle with popular source material at their peril. Still, while Eastwood's hard work shows, the choices he made also come with a cost: Yes, a moral cost for those who see his work, but also the outright loss of those discerning moviegoers who never will. (pluggedin.com)

Having seen the stage version, this is a generally faithful adaptation. Casting was near flawless. Disappointed that a few things that I felt were key facts were left out, but that happens. ALWAYS glad to see Christopher Walken. The age makeup was pretty embarrassing though. Yikes.

Whatever Clint Eastwood thought he was doing with this adaptation of the stage show about the Four Seasons' rise and fall, the results are uneven at best; great songs and mostly solid (if broad) performances, marred by a clunky script filled with cliches and rather flat direction (the editing isn't too great, either). And the old age makeup at the end suggests Clint learned nothing from J. EDGAR. Watchable (though pretty dull at times), but ultimately unnecessary, except for Four Seasons buffs.

It's honestly sad what happened here. With fine directing and cinematography from Clint Eastwood and classic music it's hard to go wrong, but unfortunately, almost every actor gave a stale performance. Even Walken was disappointing. The story was brought down due to this, even the entertaining mob element. Overall, the music and directing, keep this poorly-acted film afloat.

Entertaining even though it drags in places and great music.

It isn't that the music in the (20 years and counting) run of musical anthologies is that great, although the ABBA collection in [i]Mamma Mia[/i] which started it all comes close, and it isn't even the nostalgia; it's the lack of inspiration in song writing that's able to make it past the gauntlet of suits who think music is rehashing a sound that semi-worked....once. You need go no further than the pitti-pat music in the otherwise excellent previews that accompanied this movie. This is a cry [Full review]