a lot of missed opportunities

Rating: 5/10 (22 October 2006)

Overall i felt this was a great first draft...it has the seed of something wonderful and with enough twiddling of the script (and cast?), maybe if she were to go back, re-shoot the entire thing, it might actually be a pretty darn good film. I guess this is supposed to be the final project though, so I give it just a 5.
There were a lot of great opportunities with this film, but it seemed to me that Sophia Coppola held back too much, I don't know why--she really let go with Virgin Suicides and Eternal Sunshine, took some risks that worked, but here it seems they all fell flat. The New Wave music didn't work at all in my opinion, I don't know if that is the editor's fault or hers, but where someone like Baz Luhrmann can dazzle with this technique, every musical sequence here just left me baffled, and wanting to remove a lot of those songs from my playlists (I'm afraid I just won't be able to listen to Plainsong by The Cure ever again after her use of it, ugh...same for Souxsie and Bow Wow Wow). I also wanted her to make more bridges between what was happening then and what is happening now, in relation to celebrity, politics, The People, but she never quite went there other than giving these people our butchered language. I don't know, maybe she herself is too wrapped up in that world to make any comment on it.