Powerful

Absolutely brilliant

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

It makes me wonder that the makers of a movie in which there are so much comments about good and bad writing aren't able to use these criteria for their script. This movie has got no straight story line. I mean, what it's about? Literature, love, sex, all together? Well, nothing of it works well. There is no structure, no development, no climax and no satisfying end.I was very surprised, when I've read that this was meant to be a tragic comedy, because it wasn't funny at all. Neither it was demanding, thrilling or erotic, not to mention that there was no action in it.The characters are one-dimensional at the best, non defined or annoying. Concerning the part of Mick Jagger I soon asked myself, what his function was, after all. Also Byron's wife and her dad lose meaning for the story very soon.After all a waste of time that made me ask two things: 1. Had been dilettantes at work? 2.Who goes to cinema to watch stuff like that?

Do you feel that films about novelists are inherently intelligent, and that watching them makes you better than those who watch "Hollywood garbage" that "shoved down our throats"? Does a pre-requisite for your favorite independent films involve no one ever having really heard of them?In that case, this is your movie. For the remaining 98.6% of the film-watching population: don't waste your time.The story is of a struggling writer whose critically acclaimed thriller about Hitler's secret progeny never quite took off. But he and his hyper-supportive wife quote the reviews to each other during sex (oh, wait I get it! Critics are prostituting themselves to the writers they admire: that's f-ing deep!) His next novel is about migrant workers, and it's apparently depressing. We learn this because his thick publisher explains that people riding buses to work don't want to read those kinds of downers. Since when are low-income commuters a key demographic for literary fiction?So he inexplicably becomes an escort, with Mick Jagger as his pimp. This is not nearly as amusing as it sounds. In fact, it's all very serious and ironic, and oh so very f-ing deep.The plot continues to take ridiculous, illogical turns. The farther you get in the plot, the less removed you are from reality. When it comes down to it, the screenplay is probably among the worse ever produced.

Being a nobody whose name does not come up in a Google search and a failed writer of bits of TV series, Lasker should have written a much more authoritative portrait of his alter ego, Byron Tiller. Instead there are several basic errors that the director or producer should have avoided in Lasker's script. They have nothing to do with budgetary restrictions. With so many films having been written about writers, by writers, it seems incredible that they should still be produced with fundamental faults that would never be tolerated, for example, in a script about lawyers by a lawyer like John Grisham. First, no failed novel is remaindered after seven years. More like six months. So the film starts out with a false premise. Second, a writer who has produced nothing significant for seven years does not maintain a professional office in downtown Pasadena, even in a second-rate building. He works in his spare room, just like tens of thousands of other writers who consider themselves to be doing quite well. Being able to maintain his own office, he therefore has no motivation to take up a type of work that evidently repels him and the plot loses credibility. The successful writer who later features in the story admits that Tiller "might be right" when Tiller calls him "a genius", and yet the riches enjoyed by genius seldom accord with literary preeminence but with bestsellerdom and the two are linked only rarely, compare e.g. the comparative economic status of J.K.Rowling (incredibly rich) and, say, Terry Southern (incredibly poor), or even John Kennedy Toole who, despairing of ever being published, killed himself before his 'Confederacy of Dunces' won all the prizes. If this film had been more accurate about the literary business, it would have been a better work of art. Incidentally, the odd relationship between the three main characters when they go public was very common in European high society, where rich old men often had young noble wives. It was socially permissible for them to have a young admirer in tow, as long as the niceties were observed. He was called a "cavaliere servente", and another literary notable, George Gordon Lord Byron, played this role for several years in 19th century Tuscany. Another odd literary set-up was the household of Aldous Huxley, where his wife, who was bisexual, would screen his young female admirers horizontally before ushering them into the Presence.

The Man From Elysian Fields starts out very promisingly, with snappy, literate dialogue and interesting characters, but by the end it sadly deteriorates into a 3rd rate soap opera, and an unbelievable one at that. Mick Jagger, whose character narrates, is perfect in his role as the seducer/defiler (a man of definite wealth and taste), and everyone else is capable enough; it just doesn't really work, unfortunately.