Hooray For Hollywood (Movie Thoughts: Maps To the Stars)

Julianne Moore won Best Actress last year for the movie "Maps To The Stars," and some say it is a better performance than her Academy-Award winning role in "Still Alice." I don't know if I agree with that. While her role as Havana Segrand here is more daring, and a braver choice, her refined elegant take as an early Alzheimer patient in "Still Alice" was more crowd-pleasing. But everyone else in "Maps To The Stars" despicable, and that is probably why I am having a hard time warming up the movie.  The movie shows different characters in Tinseltown, and every single one of them is damaged. There's the thirteen year old boy Evan Bird who is on a box-office hit franchise, his sister who tried to burn down their house, their father who does self-help books, and all of them act miserably. Director David Cronenberg paints Hollywood as a sick town filled with sick people. And this is not a film with black humor. This is pretty serious stuff. By the end of the movie, I felt exhausted.  Maybe that is the point of the movie, and I do get that, but maybe I am just too old to pay good money for a bad experience.