AMADEUS.

In other words, bollocks with balls?

(OTOH I think viewers who can't figure out that the extremely insane/childish portrait of Mozart is the way that Salieri is telling it and not necessarily an honest vision of the man should just go home)

xpost Alex if you don't accost him with dialogue and then bust out in the shrieky laugh I will be so disappointed.

There is no confirmation on whether Costanze actually called him "Wolfie".

I couldn't find the one of you. :(

wait? are we talking about 'Moulin Rouge' now?

I'll see what I can do. I have accosted Griffin Dunne with lines from "After Hours". I used to live up the street from him (12th Street & University Place, Dunne-stalkers!) and saw him on the street a fair amount. At first, I merely asked him when the film would finally see the light of day as a DVD (he never had an answer). He had the misfortune of seeing me again a few months later, however, after myself and my friend Rob had well crossed the Rubicon separating sobriety from infantile oblivion. Upon spotting him, an avalanche of incongruous one-liners from the film ("Neil, Pepe! I DIDN'T KNOW!!!", "WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? I'M JUST A WORD PROCESSOR FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!", etc.) proceeded to give him serious pause.

It's really not supposed to be a historical film, to begin with. It's about Salieri, as pointed out above, or more accurately, the feelings that Salieri represents in all of us (not necessarily re artistic jealousy, per se - I think we all have at least one overachiever in our past whom we felt didn't deserve their successes). So whether or not this is the real Mozart, a historically fictionalized Mozart, or just someone who has the same name and is really similar in odd ways to the real Mozart...none of this matters - it's not really a Mozart film or even a Salieri film - it's about resentment and mediocrity in the face of genius. Just happens that they chose real people to fit to the characters.

The most interesting thing, I think, about the film is that it really seems to posit the thesis that Mozart's place in the canon of the time was akin to the shock of punk music on the then-contemporary popular music scene, and the lifestyle, sensibility, rebelliousness, and outrageous fashion choices (wigs, especially) of Mozart seem to reflect this. Punk Mozart, hmm.

It is, of course, yet again another possible example of "this film is nowhere near the reality of the situation" but like G said, and a few earlier, that's not what it's supposed to be...

oh yeah, one of my college professors looked EXACTLY and laughed EXACTLY like tom hulce. it was pretty scary.

x-post

Huh? (Exactly[?]...)

i kinda liked amadeus for its over-the-top qualities. and b/c it was the first place where i ever heard the magic flute, which is like my favorite opera of all time.

oops

Jeffrey Jones steals the movie whenever he gets a scene.

Scusi, Patrick Hines?

Ah. Ha.

abraham's hamming in this is v skilled i think. maybe i wish his performance in the later scenes (deathbed etc) let the rotted, cackling narrator of the framing device show thru a little more-- but in general his funny unctuousness is well+eerily paired w his (also funny) hellish agony at being able to appreciate mozart. "broad drama" is a tricky thing to do this well.

grazie, signore

it is miraculous

Talking of which it is his 80th birthday today

I meant to show this movie to my partner but I guess now only the (wildly inferior) director's cut is available?

Too...brute for singing.

The original cut is on the original, flipper DVD from '97. They might be scarce now.

I'm sure this is documented somewhere, but there must be some sort of contractual reason that the extended version is now the only one available in basically any in-print version.

Well. There it is.

Ah maybe this explains why I couldn't make it through when I tried a couple years ago

As mentioned upthread only the 3 hour cut is available on digital outlets and I’m two hours in, I’ll probably finish it tomorrow but I might not.

Idk I think I’m with deems on this one

A movie about F Murray Abraham’s anger at God should have a lot more pathos than this does!

Emperor Joseph II mvp.

Overall I think Interview with the Vampire is better.

Director's cut of this is shit.

It’s been a long time since I torrented anything, maybe would’ve been the right move here.

he’s still getting absolutely torched pic.twitter.com/3EuFoTSwty

— Graham 2: Cruise Control (@GrahamC47) November 29, 2023

Saw this for the first time ever today; no longer in the running for the most famous movie I'd never seen. (Not an accident, never wanted to see it, but it was a rep screening close by, so why not.)

F. Murray Abraham is very good. I liked the scene where Mozart and Salieri wrote music together. And the ending did resonate with me: immediately started thinking of lots of mediocrities who outlived their betters. Tom Hulce's giggle was unbearable--terrible decision to keep that up for two hours. The only other Best Picture nominee that year I've seen is Places in the Heart, ages ago. Let's call that one a wash. Quick scan of all the AA nominees in 1984 suggests it was a lousy year for studio movies.

If it was a rep screening, I presume you saw the original theatrical edit. The extended version has its fans, but I'm not among them.

_does_ the extended version have its fans? most people i know prefer the original theatrical edit!

It has fans with paid-up Mr.Skin subscriptions.

It was the director's cut, announced in the opening credits. I don't have anything to compare it to, but I assume it's longer--didn't realize it'd be almost three hours, although I should have, being a big prestige film.

That cut is ~20 mins longer, mostly because of the return visit Stanzi makes to Salieri later in the evening.

the mozart-salieri feud is more or less made up, of course, by pushkin in 1830 but elaborated by playwright peter shaffer in the 1970s -- but it does have at least a slim basis in another feud, or duel really: emperor joseph ii invited mozart and muzio clementi to play for him without telling either of them about the other, and then staged an impromptu competition. everyone* enjoyed the show and the emperor very sensibly declared it a tie. impressed by his younger rival, clementi returned to england where he already lived and worked, very successfully writing tons of pedagogical music for beginners (who may still encounter his elegantly simple and very pleasant sonatinas, the last relics of what was once quite a presence in music), and also running a piano manufacturing firm before dying in evesham of all places

*everyone except mozart that is, who was afterwards privately (and typically catty) about clementi (“a charlatan, like all italians”). he later irritated his one-time rival by stealing a theme from the sonata that clementi had played on the night of the face-off, and using it in the overture to the magic flute lol

Reading MOzarts letters makes him seem like a more intelligent person than the genius-who-is-an-ass the movie portrays

Amadeus is most fun when Jeffrey Jones presides over his imperial court of twits and every reaction shot of F. Murray Abraham glowering at Tom Hulce.

Hulce was better as the ne'er-do-well son of Jason Robards in Parenthood; he's Mozart without talent.

Second MVP:

https://i.imgur.com/Z7JJ7FM.gif

SLAM DANCE (1987) erasure

Also: Amadeus is by far the most fun Best Picture Oscar winner of that dreary decade.

otm re:Jones, he's such perfect casting for that part

Another awesome F. Murry AbraHAM moment: calling Geraldine Page the Greatest Actress in the English Language at the '85 Oscars, causing Anne Bancroft to roll her eyes before remembering she's on camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fySIsudfmuI

I mostly remember this film as the first prestige picture I ever saw that contained fart jokes.

(p.s. - Hi, clem!)

I think it was between this and Jarman's Caravaggio that fed my teenager head with the idea that decadent artistes are extremely cool.

I love this movie and love Hulce in it and never understood why people razzed him abt it

It was the laugh I couldn't take; it made me cringe the first time, and from there just got worse. (If it's supposed to make you cringe, that doesn't make it any more bearable.) He had some pretty good quieter moments towards the end, and as a conductor--not really knowing anything about what he's supposed to look like--he seemed credible to me, probably more so than Bradley Cooper.

Of course the laugh is meant to be irritating - it’s pretty much the most overt expression of the major themes of ‘genius sometimes comes in repugnant packages’ - or ‘genius is vulgar’ - or ‘genius is no excuse for bad taste’.

I think the film would have benefitted greatly if they'd come up with something other than a jarring affectation repeated 30 times to get that across.

i mean its certainly a theme one can pick for a movie but why anyone would willingly sit through that movie remains a mystery

I thought the hahahahas were a nice contrast to the souped-up orchestrations and staging of Mozart’s music, the film made the character more annoying and his work more dazzling. Did this film kill Hulce’s career? I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything else

Career as producer
Among Hulce's major projects are the six-hour, two-evening stage adaptation of John Irving's The Cider House Rules; and Talking Heads, a festival of Alan Bennett's one-man plays that won six Obie Awards, a Drama Desk Award, a special Outer Critics Circle Award, and a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play. He also headed 10 Million Miles, a musical project by Keith Bunin and Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter Patty Griffin, that premiered in Spring 2007 at the Atlantic Theater Company.

Hulce was a lead producer of the Broadway hit Spring Awakening, which won eight Tony Awards in 2007, including one for Best Musical.

that seems alright!

after a long and successful stage career and a few select movie roles - sounds like he retired as early and as much as possible from movies tbh

It has been claimed that the concept for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's bizarre laugh was taken from "references in letters written about him by two women who met him", that describe him as laughing in "an infectious giddy" which sounds "like metal scraping glass". No citations have ever been provided for these letters, however. There is no indication as to who wrote them, to whom or when. And in the absence of further citations, these claims of historical evidence for Mozart's laugh should be regarded as dubious at best. Robert L. Marshall, writing in "Film as Musicology: Amadeus" (The Musical Quarterly, Vol.18/2, 1997, p.177) says that there is "absolutely no historical evidence for this idiosyncrasy. We simply have no contemporary testimony at all as to how Mozart sounded when he laughed." Marshall goes on to explain that the laugh is a dramatic device, representing the mocking laughter of the gods, as Salieri states in the script.

could those letters have been written by....francis bacon?

interesting, gyac.

I thought Tom Hulce's portrayal of Mozart in the film was surprising and delightful, it added an unexpected element to the story, and I agree with fgti it really highlighted the music in relation to the character

its good

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5307/5307-h/5307-h.htm

" I am apt to lose confidence in myself. The days when, standing on a stool, I sang Oragna fiaguta fa, and at the end kissed the tip of your nose, are indeed gone by; but still, have my reverence, love, and obedience towards yourself ever failed on that account? I say no more. As for your reproach about the little singer in Munich [see No. 62], I must confess that I was an ass to write such a complete falsehood. She does not as yet know even what singing means."

It’s a fun movie and I watched it multiple times but Mozart was never so annoying.

In real life