Valentino: The Last Emperor

Valentino: The Last Emperor (2008)
Directed by Matt Tyrnauer
Starring Valentino (Garavani), Giancarlo Giammetti, Nati Abascal

Synopsis
A documentary about the (approximately) year leading up to a huge 45th anniversary celebration of Valentino and the party itself.  Epilogue text is included.

The Woman

this was ok. it was actually kind of boring. the dresses were beautiful (of course) but the rest was pretty shme. i kind of felt the same way about the documentary on....i'm totally blanking....jeeebus.....i'll comeback to this. it was fun to see valentino and his long, long time partner in life and business, giancarlo, bicker. LAGERFELD! jeezy chrizzy! yes lagerfeld, it reminded me of the lagerfeld documentary. i thought i would be really into it, but it came off kind of boring. "the september issue" was interesting to me, as was "unzipped". i guess because those were more about the creative process and less about the designer's or editor's personal life?

it was sad to see his empire sort of get taken over by corporations. when will the money makers understand people love things like that for a long time because of the artistic vision behind them and the care taken to ensure the quality of the product. when it becomes about the bottom line things become cheap and uninteresting. i'm such a control freak i couldn't stand my name being being the name of a company that was throwing my life's work in  the toilet.

MOster

This is an interesting experience to me as a reviewer.  The subject matter was quite interesting and the items which were photographed were beautiful.  But the intellectual presentation of the information was lacking.  For the first hour it was little more than a pretty pretty puff piece; and then we started to get more into the financial issues in the company which led to a large private equity firm purchasing the vast majority of the company.  I would have liked things to be more even from the perspectives of both point-of-view (even during the last 25 minutes or so) and distribution of tone.

In spite of all that, the experience was enjoyable until it became a little heart-wrenching.  While the experience was worth my while it could have been much more than it was.