Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

tomgillespie2002 Michael Powell, the great under-appreciated British film director mainly recognised for his work alongside Hungarian Emeric Pressburger, spent most of his early career working towards the perfect marriage of the power of operatic music and the visual splendour of cinema. This can be glimpsed in the masterpieces Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and to a certain degree, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1949), but it wasn't until 1951 that he completed his ultimate goal. With The Tales of Hoffmann, an adaptation of Jacques Offenbach's flamboyant opera, Powell and Pressburger achieved what no other film has succeeded in doing since: bringing the opera to life on screen and infusing it with all the colour and vibrancy of cinema. Martin Scorsese, an lifelong admirer of P & P, recently oversaw a 4K remastering of the movie; the perfect medium to take in this lavish picture.Staying true to the structure of Offenbach's vision, The Tales of Hoffmann comes with a prologue, epilogue, and three central acts all centred around the past loves of man-of-the-world Hoffmann (Robert Rounseville). As a stage performance featuring his current love plays out in the background, Hoffmann tells an eager group of friends of three women he has loved and lost. The first act, which is the brightest and most farcical, sees him duped into loving an automaton called Olympia (played by the beautiful Moira Shearer) by a pair of magical glasses that seemingly bring inanimate objects to life. The second act takes place in a hellish Venice, where an evil magician promises his courtesan Giulietta (Ludmilla Tcherina) expensive jewellery in exchange for her seduction of Hoffmann and the theft of his shadow. In the third and final act, Hoffmann falls for Antonia (Ann Ayars), a soprano suffering from a mysterious illness that forbids her to sing.The disregard for traditional cinematic narrative structure means that The Tales of Hoffmann is certainly an acquired taste, but there is also nothing else quite like it. Backed by a thumping score from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham and brought to life with ravishing set and costume design by Hein Heckroth (who was Oscar nominated twice for the film), Hoffmann is a treat for all the senses. It's particularly adored by filmmakers, with Cecil DeMille voicing his admiration for the film, and George A. Romero stating it to be his favourite movie of all time and the reason he wanted to become a director. There are also fine performances throughout, in particular Moira Shearer, who I fell head over heels for in The Red Shoes, and Robert Helpmann, the Child Catcher himself, who plays Hoffmann's nemesis in all the stories. Only Rounseville and Ayars perform their own vocals, but the film is graceful enough to reward the vocalists by a credits sequence that sees both singers and performers take a bow.

MisterWhiplash In the span of three stories involving love found and lost - one with a 'Doll' that dances and sings and then is taken apart, another with a woman who is tasked to take the titular character's reflection away for nefarious purposes (and for the love of jewels that could, gasp, turn back into wax), and lastly with a woman who has a terminal illness (in an Opera, good heavens!) and a conversation with a dead mother may make things right, or worse for Hoffmann and his love - the filmmakers get a lot of awe-inspiring visuals. It's really all about that, the love of filmmaking and, in their experiment here in bringing Opera, like REAL Opera, all singing in the dialog, it's mostly a wonderful feat in the Technicolor, 'Stage-set' style.It's a flawed masterwork - not all of it hits on all cylinders. At certain times the singing and dancing is so, well, operatic that it may be a little too easy to see that the talent is there if not the heart (this is just in parts of the second and third segments, but it was enough for me to take notice). And yet the filmmakers care so much after the world they're crafting that when all of the actors and singers and dancers and craftsmen come together in unison, it transports you into this world of theatrical exuberance and flamboyance and COLORS. This could take an art class a few weeks to analyze just on the palettes alone.As in the 'Doll' story with Moira Shearer as Olympia, practically a robot who is wound up and set off to be the 'play-thing' for the titular character only to be torn away and torn apart (literally, in magical, exquisitely tragic detail). She's dancing her ass off, and for a little while Powell, Pressburger, Shearer and company make it ias great as the Red Shoes, even that far. Just the sight of the puppets, the marionettes, and how they figure into the story is pure delight.For someone who doesn't really care for opera much... these filmmakers, for a little while, made me care through the means of their cinematic prowess. This is style and sex appeal but put into a "safe" framework. For children in the early 50's - such as Scorsese and George Romero, the biggest champions of the picture - it must've messed them up something fierce.

Nin Chan Despite P&P's insistence that the Tales of Hoffmann was 'made in England', it is clear that their obsessions are continental in nature. Clear parallels can be drawn to Thomas Mann, whose 'Tonio Kroger', 'Death In Venice' and 'Doktor Faustus' all probe the Nietzschean-Freudian intersection between art and death, as well as the work of Georges Bataille, the premier French theorist of excess and expenditure. Bataille's appropriation of Freud, alloying Freud's mature work with Nietzsche and Maussian anthropology, sought to merge the Eros-Thanatos couple: at its fullest intensity, life is indiscernible from death. This is the sovereign principle of a Bataillean ethics- dedicate yourself to the immediate, for the eternal resides in the instantaneous. For Bataille, as for Nietzsche, nature is inherently unconcerned with conservation and duration, all-too-human provisions for the future- energy desires to vent and spend itself, beauty desires to flaunt itself in all of its naked splendor.Tales of Hoffmann is effectively a companion piece to The Red Shoes, extrapolating some of the central concerns of said film- passion is a sickness, an entropic force that marks the lover for death. This is not because the lover has some sort of congenital debility, some biological lack, far from it- desire, insatiable and voracious, suffuses the lover with an abundance of life, the intensity of which cannot be contained in the lived body. This violent, lacerating urge, the fullest possible expression of life, is truly beyond good and evil, transcending the strictures of polite society in favor of recklessness and abandon.This is the source of P&P's somewhat mechanistic fatalism. Humanistic trifles such as 'free will' are jettisoned in lieu of an unflinching Lacanianism: at the core of humanity is a monstrous, inhuman energy that overrules any conscious attempts to contain or domesticate it. This is the lesson learnt from P&P's transposition of Hoffmann's classic 'Der Sandman'- Hoffmann is scarcely less of an automaton than Olympia. As an extension of The Red Shoes, the final tale is perhaps the most beautiful of the film's formidable troika: the final set piece is a delirium-inducing, shattering crescendo to the proceedings. I don't know anything about P&P's biographies or their working lives, but they seem intensely interested in Mann's idea of creativity as a faustian curse, a consumptive disease that places the artist outside the pale of 'healthy' society.Formally, the film is a consummate masterpiece, its wantonness commensurate to its content - the sheer gratuitousness of the spectacle reminds one of Max Ophuls' "Lola Montes" and Fellini's "Satyricon". It is all very beautiful, and the colors are all very hypnotic, but the film remains profoundly disturbing- the pleasure I derive from watching this film is directly proportional to the horror I feel when Antonia hits her final note...

mr_hunchback Commendable for its avant garde techniques, this film was no doubt appreciated by Kenneth Anger, Fellini and Mario Bava. The first two acts are pretty solid - Olympia is whimsical surrealism and Giulietta is sensual surrealism. The Antonia segment torpedoes the entire project and I strongly suggest viewers quit at the end of act two, while they're ahead. Powell either ran out of money, ran out of inspiration, or both. Hoffmann's character is essentially written out of the third act and Powell focuses at length on Anne Ayars - a dumpy old thing with no screen presence. For a director who always discovered great looking talent, from Deborah Kerr to Helen Mirren, it seems suspicious that he would want Ayars in one of his most colorful films. One can pretty accurately surmise that she was sleeping with one of the money bags involved in the production. It makes for pretty miserable finale.For Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang fans, this film contains a big animated role for Robert Helpmann who played the Child Catcher.