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Just what I expected

Just perfect...

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

The Brazilian movie Flores Raras was shown in the United States with the title Reaching for the Moon (2013). It was directed by Bruno Barreto.The film is based on the life of the great American poet, Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto). As the movie begins, Elizabeth is traveling in Brazil, and visits the estate of the famous architect Lota de Macedo Soares, played by Glória Pires. Lota is in a lesbian relationship with Bishop's college friend Mary (Tracy Middendorf).Despite Elizabeth's somewhat proper and restricted outlook, she accepts the love offered by Lota, even though this leaves Mary as the odd woman out. This act struck me as a shabby betrayal of an old friend, but, in the movie, it's treated as true love that makes such betrayal acceptable, if not inevitable.It doesn't hurt that Lota has an enormous estate, and enormous resources. As an architect, Lota is able to envision and then design a beautiful writer's studio for Elizabeth.The strong point of the movie is that it presents the writing of poetry as work. Elizabeth doesn't just close her eyes and wait until the poetic muse strikes her. She sits in the studio and pushes and pulls her poetry into shape. She's also not happy when she's interrupted during the creative process. This is the only film I can remember where creating a poem is shown as a process, and a delicate and difficult process at that.This idyllic existence is disrupted by Brazilian political events, into which Lota plunges. The remainder of the movie is devoted to how these events play out in the lives of Elizabeth and Lota.I don't know enough about the details of the coup, or of the lives of the film's principals, to know how accurately the film portrays them. This aspect of the movie is highly melodramatic, but the actual events were probably equally melodramatic. Certainly, the film holds your interest as the situation plays itself out to the end.We saw this movie on the large screen, where it will work better, especially in the scenes set on Lota's estate. However, it will work well enough on the small screen. It's not a great movie, but it's certainly good enough to repay you for finding and watching it.

However truthful to Elizabeth Bishop's tragic love affair with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, Bruno Barreto's Reaching for the Moon is more generally engaged with the question: Is the examined life worth suffering?In this corner, Elizabeth (Miranda Otto), a wan, fragile, painfully timid and insecure poet who is mortified to hear one of her poems read aloud. In her insecurity and sense of powerlessness she is Woman. She dresses like an office manager's wife and wears her hair tight to her face. She compulsively observes and anatomizes her observations. Her life is at first nothing but her examining it.In contrast Lota has a large strong face, flowing long hair, a man's stocky build, and a man's aggressive stride and nature. She never questions herself or her impulses and she has the money not just to do what she wants but to get others to do so too. When she tells Elizabeth that she and her current amour, Elizabeth's college friend Mary (Tracy Middendorf), were just roommates, she admits Mary hasn't thought that. Probably Lota hasn't either. To draw Mary back into her fold as a friend Lota buys her a child. Lota is also creative, designing her sumptuous country estate and — after she helps friend Carlos (Marcello Airoldi) get elected Governor — designs and supervises the construction of a large public park, with towering standards to provide the magic of moonlight. But she's not a thinker, a meditator. She just acts. Not given to self-analysis, when the new guest Elizabeth arrives Lota leaps to wrong conclusions about her.Part of their antithesis is cultural. As Elizabeth drunkenly tells the Rio audience at her National Book Awards dinner, "How can someone raised in the desert swim like a fish?" The withdrawn Elizabeth doesn't understand the Brazilian exuberance, constant joy, and carefreeness, as they celebrate everything — even after the military coup has reduced their freedoms.But the contrast is mainly in the women's character. Still, though Lota is the first to express her love for Elizabeth — which the poet only reciprocates when Lota is asleep — in their first clinch Elizabeth assumes the ardent initiative. And despite -- or because of -- her relentless analyzing, Elizabeth is an alcoholic.With her deep pessimism and self-doubt, Elizabeth stumbles from success to success: the Pulitzer, the NBA, a slot in The New Yorker, the man Aldous Huxley's approval, a teaching gig at NYU. Her life examining works for her. But the ebullient, confident Lota breaks down at her first defeat: the new government corrupts her vision of the park, converting it into the cliché sterile paved soccer court. When Elizabeth asks if her going to New York caused Lota's depression, Mary clearly blames the ruin of her project. "How could you think anyone could be that confident?"For her part, Mary begins as a jejeune, non-thinking sort who doesn't expect her college friend to steal her lover. Dumped, Mary realizes she has "no other option" than to love Lota. But by film end she has learned to read people and situations. Motherhood may have taught her wariness. When she aborts Elizabeth's correspondence with Lota it is not out of selfish malice, but because she knows that Lota's losing Elizabeth again would destroy her. Events prove her right.Hence the poem Elizabeth ends too soon at the start of the film and rounds out at the end. "The art of losing isn't hard to master." Not if you're a thinker. The frightened self- doubter sees enough loss to handle her own and not just thrive but survive. The robust willful woman who never paused to consider human vulnerability is defeated by her first loss — and kills herself at the second.

Reaching for the Moon is the kind of movie everyone hopes for but no one makes: a gay romance where "gay romance" is not the premise. Director Bruno Barreto focuses instead on how Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares challenged and changed the world and each other in other ways, and that was absolutely the right choice - these women and their story are fascinating and make for top class entertainment.And it is entertaining. Considering the characters' issues and the story's ending it could have been drab, but the film is always lively and engaging. It flies by. Bishop takes herself very seriously, but Barreto maintains a sense of humor about it and makes fun of her just enough to keep her melodrama under control. An added bonus is that Miranda Otto gets to show off her underrated and underused comedic chops; one particular drunk scene is priceless. Glória Pires is dynamic and fiery as Lota but Otto is the real star, channeling Greta Garbo and Deborah Kerr in a gracefully commanding performance. She doesn't shy away from Bishop's spikiness, but her screen presence is so compelling that as much as we might be frustrated with her character, we can't take our eyes off her. Thanks to her constantly surprising performance, an eclectic ensemble cast, breathtaking visuals, and assured direction, Reaching for the Moon pulses with energy and is a breath of fresh air in an era of stuffy and bland biopics. Highlights: Shots of Rio de Janeiro that belong on postcards; a performance from Miranda Otto that would have won an Oscar in 1937; the assertion that some things are more important than whether a person is gayVerdict: Watch this with your parents instead of Blue Is the Warmest Color

Overall had a very good impression of the movie. I think it balanced well certain aspects... especially in the portrayal of their romance. They avoided being overly prudish and that made the romance seem more real. Without getting too kinky and losing focus. The contrast between the two characters is really interesting.The actress Gloria Pires who portrays Lota de Macedo Soares has worked in dozens of soap operas and that sometimes comes through in her films, but not this time thankfully. She so embodies the force of nature that was Lota and this comes through the screen very well. I felt like I was seeing a member of my old Rio family... so her amazing portrayal was certainly the highlight of the film for me.PS: Being a Macedo Soares myself (but too young to have known Lota)... there might be a bit of bias in my review.