Review "Life itself": Demented and Morbid Epic by Dan Fogelman



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The creator of "This Is Us" takes his TV show to the big screen with Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde, with horrific results.

"Life itself" thinks you are stupid. Or, if not stupid, unable to understand how a movie should work. It's a movie designed for people who can not be trusted to understand the stories, unless it's not just spaghetti, but you get your hands on it, which is explained editing and voiceover. This is the kind of movie that includes commercials using its own title in the dialogue several times. In appearance, it is an unreliable narrative; if you do not know what it is, "Life Itself" will explain it through monologue 10 minutes after launching a demo in action. However, the film uses unreliable storytelling as a means of passing bad narration as a feature, not a bug.

But most of the time, "Life Itself" talks about death, Fogelman co-opted the formula that made his television series "This Is Us" a success with four quadrants: twisted and twisted stories that are based on (1) Who will die next; and (2) how much are you going to cry about it? Death, or even the threat of death (in Fogelman's world, it may be better to speak of the promise of death) is his grand turn, and it is the only way to advance "life itself".

A secular combination of "Rashomon" and "Babel", which brings together seemingly disparate intrigues into a massive, messy picture of (sorry, one has to) life itself, a life that embraces the heat of death. Told in five chapters of a mysteriously unequal length, "Life Itself" opens with Will (Oscar Isaac), a man who feels too much and loves too much and who is featured in multiple episodes, from # 39; university student to the future father in ruins, Bob Dylan drunk to speech. Today, Will has lost something that is dear to him and, as the story unfolds, Fogelman treating the agitated chronology as a narrative creativity, it becomes clear that he has much suffered. He will suffer more quickly. Will lost his wife Abby (Olivia Wilde), and subsequent chapters will explore how this happened and what he did for dozens of others beyond him. (Spoiler: There is no risk of spoilers in a complicated plot.)

Dylan (Olivia Cooke), the tragic spawn of Will and Abby, in a truncated chapter intended to continue grief on a large scale, stands out above all for the scene where Dylan strikes a girl in the face and then pushes a PB & J into her throat. The third and fourth chapters of the film present a loving Spanish family and their heartbroken employer (Antonio Banderas). All this leads to grief, betrayal and a whole sequence designed to make fun of a minor character who has not looked back and forth across the street, and everything is interconnected with all the above.

Twists can be seen at one kilometer, but there is a narration to guide everything and useful feedbacks that make all the work look like its own "network drama catchup". It all boils down to a last chapter that is nothing more than a worthwhile epilogue, but this optimistic 15-second coda has no chance. Although it is designed to reward us after the destruction, the pain, at least two horribly bloody bus crashes and a weird plot about sexual abuse, this movie is so obsessed with death that it's "deadly". he did not want to give us reason to take care of the living.

Grade: D

"Life Itself" made its world premiere at TIFF. Amazon Studios will release it in theaters on September 21st.

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