I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

A Masterpiece!

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Blistering performances.

Daivd Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' tells the convergent stories of several different characters in Hollywood: at first it appears as if this is one of those films about discrete lives that form a fine web of faint touches, but in fact it turns out that (most) of the characters have serious history, and are coming back together after events that have driven them apart. This reveal is quite well-plotted; the problem is that the characters are all mostly nasty (or at the very least weird), and moreover are so in a uniquely Hollywood way - you can believe there are such people in and around the movie business, but they're simply not the sort of people that most of us meet in our everyday lives. This makes it quite hard to sympathise with them, even if we can see the reason for their meanness and oddness. Cronenberg's movies can be considered cold in general, and although the charge isn't always justified, I watched this one very much from the outside. One thing it isn't, in spite of its billing as such, is a comedy.

I know that a lot of the famous cult directors of the 1980s are now making less than impressive films in the new millennium (John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Brian De Palma, etc.) but Cronenberg's fall from grace is odd in a uniquely odd Cronenbergian way. This is the guy who made gutsy, cerebral, body horror pictures for most of his career, then made a couple of fantastic thrillers in the 2000s with A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and EASTERN PROMISES, and now out of nowhere makes near-unwatchable nonsense.COSMOPOLIS was the first of a double bill of terrible films looking at the cult of celebrity and the lives of the maladjusted in Hollywood. There's more going on in this one than COSMOPOLIS, but it's still awful: poorly written, badly acted, and mistaking bad taste for wit. Julianne Moore gives an awful and histrionic turn as a washed-up actress who spends the film screaming or having gratuitous sex. A bunch of other actors show up at times and do weird things like set themselves on fire or shoot family pets. It's supposed to be a satire but you wouldn't know it; this is poorly-conceived stuff indeed, with lots of dragged-out extraneous material and scenes which don't work. It has exactly one satisfying and brutal murder scene and one ridiculously awful-looking CGI fire, and that's about it.

I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I selected Maps to the Stars for my in-flight entertainment. I thought based on the title it would be like an updated version of Robert Altman's The Player. I was wrong. Maps to the Stars has Mia "Alice in Wonderland" Wasikowska in a role that has an undertone of innocence, and the ending scene with her on screen brother was haunting. Benjie's line "13 summers...not so bad" was said with no hint of regret or resignation before the horrible deed is done.I loved the rivalry between Benjie and the child actor with red hair during the shoots of Benjie's summer camp movie. But again, what Benjie did to the child actor rival was horror or horrible.I do wonder if any of the characters have redeeming features. Maps to the Stars is definitely not a date movie.

I can't remember the last time I saw a look at the world of Hollywood and just downright ego as awful as Maps to the Stars. I mean that as a compliment though; this could go one of two ways quite possibly, as being just tawdry melodrama like a soap opera, or into such terrain that aside from the characters being unlikable (which is not an inherently bad thing) it becomes boring. The latter of these was a problem on David Cronenberg's previous film, Cosmopolis, where I didn't give a s*** about the characters even in the satirical setting. But what makes Maps to the Stars for me such a captivating experience is that these are people in some earth-bound reality, but they are for the most part consumed by their own sense of self-worth either due to their pasts and legacy in Hollywood (Julianne Moore's Havana with her deceased star mother; John Cusack as a best-selling kooky New-Age-like author), or those who are getting subsumed by it or those around (Evan Bird's young actor character Benjie, and his beleaguered mother played by Olivia Williams).It's a complicated film in ways that include it being a ghost story. By this I don't mean Paranormal Activity or in some 'Gotcha' kind of spooktacular thing. This is more like, if I can think back to anything, like during a play when there are ghosts that appear to characters on stage to haunt them in a more existential/familial sense (the closest I can compare it to are the few moments in Fanny & Alexander where the father's ghost appears). While the characters in this story, eventually revolving around the reappearance of Mia Wasikowska's character Agatha, who was away for years after starting a fire and nearly killing her family (Cusack, Williams, Bird), it's a strange mixture of just cutting, acidic satire on not so much the industry but what it does to people's self-worth - the parts to obtain, ageism, sex appeal, who's f***ing who over - and also with this sense of other spiritual beings messing with Benjie and Havana.I think what struck me the most was how straightforward Cronenberg presents these ghosts. They're there, we know they're not really there, and the only predictable thing is that, once or twice of course, reality blends into the un-reality in fatal ways. There are a few instances the movie gets bloody, and almost kind of savage (when a gun goes off in a particular scene it's almost to a point of 'Why?' but that's the point and it's a savage moment). But this is more about how the characters cope with the world around them, whether it's Pattinson's chauffeur, the one sort of outsider who is trying to break in as an actor, or of course Moore as this completely vulnerable but extremely, shall one say, 'clever' about the business and what it does to a person. I wonder if Moore would've played it the same had the original plan gone through, which was to make the film 10 years prior; Moore looks spectacular for her age, any age, but maybe ten years ago it wouldn't be as believable she wouldn't get the part because of this or that reason having to do with looks, which is the subtext here.A large part of why this film works rests on the acting I think. Cronenberg's direction is sure-footed here and he goes a long way to find the little human moments between characters in the midst of what is a very bleak and dark world where business meetings have a detached air (and notice how often Cronenberg shoots singles on actors, that is we often don't get a full wide view of a room or who's in it, people feel disconnected as they have to talk and look at one another, like they're in different spaces in the same space). But I think this is a case where the script probably read one way, and the actors give it a kind of extra life and lift, so that Moore and Wasikowska and even Cusack, who plays basically a self-promoting, pseudo-psychcic BS artist, and gives them dimension. We may not like them, but that's not the point. I think if you can find these people interesting enough, even when they do some really terrible things, it can pull you through.The ending starts to get... too weird, if that's possible for a Cronenberg film, but more in a subtle, quiet way than you'd see in his early work, maybe even disquieting, how two characters in particular end up together. For the most part, I felt in capable hands in a filmmaker and screenwriter who were attempting to experiment with expectations on how people who we know are human beings have become or could become monstrous, whether they're thirteen years old or middle-aged. And Evan Bird, the one principal actor I didn't know well, gives this character an air that makes him probably the least likable of all - the arrogant adolescent "star" actor - but doesn't make him cartoonish or too broad. There's deeper things going on under the surface here, even if it can't really be totally seen all the time; it's the kind of black-death-comic look at Hollywood (and needless to say some of this dialog is quite funny when it's not dramatic or just weird) that would make a helluva double bill with Barton Fink.