THE TÁRPIT: THE INTERNET'S #1 TÁR HATE PAGE.

Welcome, weary traveler. If you've arrived here, you should know that it's my solemn duty to let you know that...

The header image of this page was made by shmomar, and I know it would make Lydia Tár furious.

Navigation: MY INITIAL REACTION TO TÁR | BETTER WAYS TO SPEND 2 HOURS AND 38 MINUTES | MOVIES THAT HAVE WON MORE OSCARS THAN TÁR | HOW MUCH MUSIC IS IN THIS MOVIE, ANYWAY? | SOME SCENES THAT SUCK! | WHAT ARE THE CRITICS SAYING? | WATCH BETTER MOVIES! | SCHEDULE A TÁR DETOX!

Masato Kouda - Proof of a Hero (MIDI Version)

OH BROTHER, THIS MOVIE STINKS!

Wikipedia is lying to you. It desperately wants you to believe that Todd Field's 2022 movie Tár is "among the best films of the 2020s". Oh, sure, it tries to deflect by citing some sources and taking the words from them, but I don't care! Anyone who likes this movie is wrong. I know they're wrong because I went into this movie with the brightest of eyes and the most open of hearts. I wanted passion, fury, music, perhaps some terror! I got none of that. I got less than I expected, and so much more of less. From the opening of the film, which were the ending credits that promised music from Monster Hunter, to the last miserable I-Swear-This-Is-Racist second, I was subjected to a movie that let me down every step of the way until I was nothing but a smouldering husk by the end of it. I could feel Mandy wanting to leave the movie theater after the first hour, though they insisted on sticking it out, and that's something I have never felt from them before. We have a high tolerance for bad movies, but if there's something worse than a bad movie, it's a movie that is utterly convinced it's a good movie, can fool swathes of people into thinking it's a good movie, but is at its core a Bad Film. Technically, Tár is fine, but it is almost three hours of a promise it never delivers, and it never delivers it in the most insultingly pretentious manner it can possibly think of, and it doesn't even do it interestingly.

Here's what I had to say one day after subjecting myself to one of the worst movies I've ever seen:

The day has come. I have to log something that isn't horror on here because if I don't I think I will explode. This film is an utter letdown from start to finish. Toothless, sexless, and most criminally of all entirely lacking in musicality. It is a film that is so obsessed with attempting to be "subtle" (while simultaneously positing a frankly insane level of strawman arguments and bizarre asides on the concept of "cancel culture" - including a laughable sequence where our protagonist gets turned into a YouTube Poop) that it forgets to actually show any grime or scandal that would dare make the film interesting. I've never felt more utterly bamboozled by a brilliant trailer in my life. I was hoping for a dizzying and nauseating and vicious character study of a classical composer complete with, you know, actual exploration of the musical performance. Instead I received talking, more talking, zero showing, more talking about showing, and an embarrassingly pretentious ending. Ah, yes, she's fallen so far that she has to go to such uncivilized countries as Thailand and perform video game music. Woe is fucking her.

What the hell happened between this incredible trailer and the final product? There is so much brilliant energy in this trailer and yet none of the film has any of it or indeed so many of these images. Did they cut out all of this stuff that features her spiral? Did they add all these pointless conversations and monologues in post just to stretch things out? Where was this movie??

I find myself let down by this as much as I was because I actually love art films. I love talky films. I only log horror here but some of my favorite films in general include Drive, Mulholland Drive, In The Mood For Love, Swiss Army Man, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and others. I was excited to visit my local theater and see a film about something I'm extremely passionate about, the orchestra. And yet they couldn't even get the bloody music right! With the exception of a single sequence, in which Lydia watches her a video of her new young cellist performing in a youth orchestra, all the music sequences are cut short. I haven't seen a movie that hates the subject it is purporting to explore this much since Martin Scorsese got his hands on pool in The Color of Money. We can't even get a proper Monster Hunter World suite out of it.

I had heard good things about Cate Blanchett's performance but while she is assured in the role the script is so dire at times that she never gets the chance to be more than mildly snarky or an attempt at being untouchable that falls flat. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and it never actually does. Not when she drives a girl to suicide is the tension or trauma ramped up. Not when people accuse her of sleeping around (which...is definitely a script choice, huh). Never. This movie coasts at the same speed of 35mph and not a second faster. There's a single shining moment, where she snaps and assaults another conductor, that I thought maybe this film could be more, but then we just get shipped off to Thailand and the aforementioned ending happens. It is a film with no bite, a film actually scared of daring to present its protagonist in an overly negative light for some reason (perhaps the deeply-uncomfortable monologue about "denazification" has to do with it, hmmm) and in trying to pretend its letting the audience make the choice for themselves ends up with a movie that does not commit. It presents ideas and then shies away from them creating a shallow Rorschach Test of a film that doesn't care to explore nor challenge any of the ideas it vaguely brings up.

And how is a movie that is basically (supposedly, considering the film refuses to commit to itself) about a lesbian conductor having sex with her orchestra members this passionless and sexless? This is a film that attempts to have a queer character with zero queer trappings in its storytelling and method. It is sterile and truncated in every manner. There is no sex, no indication of the cheating outside of cowardly glances. It has none of the passion needed to be a good study of orchestral music, none of the passion needed to be a queer character study, and it certainly did not have the passion to earn the two-and-a-half hours I spent waiting for something to happen. Repetition until death was a potentially interesting theme but I saw Night Moves this year and it did it better than this could ever hope to. Disappointingly dull, philosophically vapid, lacking tension, and with a visual style that is certainly going to be fawned over with it's pleasant use of held shots and concentric rectangles but ultimately did nothing for me. It breaks my heart that I felt so strongly underwhelmed by this film because I truly desperately wanted to like it (and I did in fact have a nice time at the theater) but it joins Hellraiser 2022 in a list of films I watched this week that truly thought they were saying something but were too scared to be actually camp or queer in any meaningful way and ended up being a grim lot of dishwater. Endless bark and zero bite.

I thought maybe it'd be fun to just go see a movie based on a synopsis or a trailer especially when the trailer was so spectacular. Perhaps next time I'll do more digging before I lay down the $17 for two tickets.

- HardLuckErin on Letterboxd

THIS MOVIE IS 2 HOURS AND 38 MINUTES LONG!

That's TOO LONG! It did not need to be this long! If you are thinking of watching Tár: don't. Here's a list of things that take less time than WATCHING THIS MOVIE:

Don't let Tár disrespect your time. Treat yourself with respect.

IT BROKE A THOUSAND OSCARS AND NEVER DREW A DIME!

Shrek. The Great Gatsby. Joker. The Muppets. Pirate's of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. 8 Mile. Moulin Rouge! All of these movies have one thing in common, and it's that they won more Academy Awards than Tár. Yes, the Oscars may be a messy event with awards rarely indicative of a film's quality, but don't let that distract you from the fact that at the 95th Academy Awards, Tár was nominated for six awards and lost them all.

- 95th Academy Awards - Wikipedia

You'll notice it wasn't nominated for Best Original Score. The movie supposedly about music wasn't nominated for Best Original Score.

Furthermore, it is known that for a movie to "break even" it needs to draw approximately double at the box office than it cost to make. Wikipedia tells me this movie cost $25 million to make - $14750000 more than Terrifier 2 - and made $29.2 million, thus quantifying it as a flop. Terrifier 2 made $15.7 million in the box office. $15.7 million on a budget of $250,000!

Tár didn't break even, but a movie that had a "free barf bag with every ticket" gimmick shattered records. Just another L for MIDia FÁRT.

HOW MUCH MUSIC IS ACTUALLY IN THIS MOVIE?

This is a movie about music. Therefore, you would think that there would be sequences featuring music. I timed every scene containing music to see if that's the case. Let's see how much music there really is in Tár.

Total Amount of Music in Tár: 31m13s

Percentage of Tár Dedicated to Music: 19.757%

Less than 1/4th of this movie about music features any music!!

There is so little music in this movie that the movie's official soundtrack is not, in fact, a collection of music from the movie but a concept album featuring music From And Inspired By the motion picture. I am dead serious. They hired a composer to create an album full of the music of their fictional composer, ultimately using one song from it for the credits theme, despite crediting her for the score! What score?! They could have just made the movie this album! It would have been more interesting and meant we got to hear actual music!

TÁR LOWLIGHTS

The movie opens with a shot of Lydia on a train, being talked about by someone recording her. There is then a smash cut to the end credits of the movie, which, as indicated above, lasts three minutes and three seconds. The font is extremely small. The pure black background and white text make it difficult to even read the credits. Monster Hunter and Capcom are provided thanks, which they probably should not accept.

We are then given an expository dump by a real life interviewer from The New Yorker who runs down Lydia's achivements and accomplishments. To the untrained ear, these sound like impressive, but obtuse achievements. To the trained ear, they're nonsense. The New Yorker later reviewed the film, lampooning this scene.

HOW DID LYDIA TÁR WIN AN EGOT?? WHAT MUSICAL DID SHE SCORE OR DIRECT?? WHAT TELEVISION SHOW DID SHE WORK ON???

At one point, Lydia's Wikipedia page is edited on-camera to include a quote from the Gopnik interview, calling her one of the most important musical figures of our era, just to make sure we caught this.

There is a plot thread involving an orchestra member Lydia had previously had an affair with committing suicide following Lydia reaching out to several major orchestras and telling them not to hire her. Lydia meets with a colleague in a restaurant to discuss "misinterpretation of intentions" and the general subject of assault accusations, only for the colleague to compare the situation Lydia is in to his working under a conductor who, while he was never officially a Nazi ("Never joined the party, refused to give the salute, or to sign his letters 'Heil Hitler', even those he wrote to Hitler!") was nonetheless "obliged to be de-Nazified and stayed semi-retired...secretly performing in a graveyard.". Lydia asks incredulously if he's accusing sexual impropriety to Nazi accusations, to which the colleague tells her that either way, you "have to be ready". It's an absurd correlation and simplification of a legitimate real-world issue and is so off tonally that it circles around to being almost funny. What were they cooking?

At one point, Lydia lectures one of her students, who seems to only exist to be a satire on Those Liberal College Types as they have a distaste for Bach stemming from Bach's known misogyny, something they can't get over as "a BIPOC pangender person". Lydia tells this student they are ignorant for even asking that and plays some Bach at them.

This lecture is then later chopped up and posted on social media in what I can only describe as "an obvious YouTube Poop", and this is the video damning Lydia to face ridicule and hatred from the nebulous Internet, Ralph Breaks The Internet-style. Somehow, this is the catalyst behind people protesting her lectures for the death of the aforementioned orchestra member she had an affair with. This isn't even done via sentence-mixing, this is done by literally chopping up bits of the previous scene, complete with sharp cuts from scene-to-scene and obvious jumps in her position. Legitimately, a YouTube Poop. It's comical, especially when the final line is "Now, you could MASTURBATE but what are you acually doing- TO ME.". Personally, I felt the original unedited lecture was bad enough, but I digress.

Ultimately, Lydia goes to what Wikipedia says is The Philippines, I was under the impression was Thailand, and reviews say is "an unnamed South Asian country", and tries to get a sexual massage, but when she sees the number "5" on one of them she freaks out, because of how she couldn't conduct Mahler's 5th Symphony. Then, she ends up conducting the Monster Hunter orchestra in front of a group of very good Monster Hunter cosplayers, and they don't even show us the Monster Hunter overture! It cuts off after the first tuning note!!

And if all of that wasn't bad enough, this movie uses a scream from The Blair Witch Project completely uncredited, something that continues to harm the actors from that movie to this day.

You don't have to subject yourself to any of this. I promise.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN!

This movie about an artist’s life and work is, for the most part, utterly unilluminating about the music on which it’s centered. It delivers a few superficial details regarding Lydia’s effort to interpret the piece at the core of the film, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, in terms of the composer’s biography. As for new music, Lydia may commission it and conduct it, she may exhort Max to discover the feelings in it, but the movie never shows what Lydia herself does with it or finds in it. The best moments in the film are the few, of a quasi-documentary import, in which Lydia, in rehearsal with the orchestra, exhorts and directs the musicians in fine points of phrasing and other expressive details.

Yet the music itself is filmed with an absence of style. Not a single image of the orchestra at work has a visual melody or a contrapuntal density, and the filming of performance seems borrowed from any DVD of a symphony orchestra. (By contrast, see Edgar Ulmer’s filming of the real-life conductor Leopold Stokowski and the musicians of his orchestra in the 1947 film “Carnegie Hall.”) The conducting gestures that Lydia makes, her expressions while conducting, are laughable, not because Blanchett’s performance is in any way ridiculous but because Field’s awkward, lumpish images make it appear so.

- Richard Brody, "Tár Reviewed: Regressive Ideas to Match Regressive Aesthetics" on The New Yorker.

in summary, my two points: hypocrisy isn't the worst sin but definitely the most irritating, and i can't stand the hypocrisy of the director initiating this empty, trivial thought exercise (what if harvey weinstein was a dyke!!) while being too scared to show us if she actually did it (beyond "weird" flashbacks). secondly, the director represents what he wants you to believe is a punishing, rarefied world while having its punishing mechanisms be so factually wrong and its rarity so laughably broad that the whole conceit collapses. like tar, this movie looks expensive but it has neither guts nor brains.

- Tapnab on Letterboxd.

Cold when it should run hot, coy when it should be explicit. The veneer of European high modernism to what amounts to a banal New Yorker short story.

- Jack Sullivan on Letterboxd.

Tries for Uncut Gems, ends up as Green Book imo. Fails to productively generate any tension because the politics of this “issue” movie are so misguided (completely bombs the opening masterclass [which illustrates everything wrong with the classical music world today and I don't think the movie is on the student's side], its video edit [this is not how people cancel other people lol], and the whole denouement [casually offensive in multiple scenes as it does extremely thinly sketched drive-bys of rural America and an entire Asian culture, and the climactic tackling is some fourth-grader writing]) – its emotional aim I think is for us to vacillate between pitying and condemning her, but fuck if we care at all about what Domingo or Levine or Dutoit regret about anything.

- mikeu on Letterboxd.

The main problem with Tár isn’t that it’s messy-weird in some places and stock footage pedestrian in others, or that it paints peasants as grabby cretins, or even that it wants to splash around in the Cancel Culture conversation without getting wet; it’s that Lydia — and Feld? — views identity politics as a zero-sum game that seeks to destroy true art. Field seems to think he’s asking big questions about who is really a victim, and who is really a bad guy, and whether or not auteur theory holds here in this brave new world — but it’s way too reductive for all that. The same conducting student who says they can’t take Bach seriously because he was a misogynist also identifies, out loud, as “a BIPOC pangender person.” Fields is intent on mocking any real critics of his or Lydia’s opinion on artistic geniuses. He even refuses to bring them into focus, literally. Their faces are blurred; we can’t tell if Lydia is remembering misdeeds or tripping over her own fears; and we never see the perspective of the women Lydia has seduced and discarded. Tár is rooted firmly in Lydia’s perspective.

Also, truly, do we need another lesbian predator in lesbian cinema? At a time when “grooming” hysteria have reached a new fever pitch among Conservatives?

If you want Cate Blanchett to punch you in the face and run over you with her bicycle, that’s absolutely fine — but revisiting Carol or even Ocean’s 8 is a better way to live out that fantasy.

- Heather Hogan, "Cate Blanchett Is Bewitching But Her Lesbian Symphony Movie Is Tár-ible" on Autostraddle.

HERE IS A NON-EXHAUSTIVE LIST OF MOVIES THAT HAVE MORE MUSIC AND MORE QUEERNESS THAN TÁR:

What are you waiting for? Watch these! And don't watch Tár!!

DO YOU NEED A TÁR DETOX SESSION?

SO DID WE. The Friday after watching this abomination, we did a double feature of two films that cleansed our pallettes - The Wachowskis' 1996 lesbian thriller Bound and 1993's musical biopic anthology Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Between these two films, we got everything we wanted that Tár refused to give us - the sensual, seductive queerness and grit provided by Bound, and the whirlwind depiction of music composition artistically exploring a troubled musician's life with Glenn Gould. Both films featured more dynamic cinematography, more grit, more adventure and more character than any of Tár's 2-hour-and-38-minute runtime, and each film is just a hair over one-and-a-half-hours long.

You deserve better!

Bound can be purchased in a new 4K restoration by the Criterion Collection here. Glenn Gould is apparently available to rent on Apple TV, but it also shows up on YouTube for free fairly regularly. Either way, if you're like us and you need something to really move you after suffering through the slog that is Tár, enjoy.

Love yourself. DON'T WATCH TÁR.

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