Overrated kitsch

Afraid not ;-) This is my favourite movie of all time... from the opening titles and music, it just gives me chills down my spine. It's the most beautiful film I have ever seen, and totally the opposite of kitsch in my opinion!

However, we can't all like the same things so if that's the way you feel, that's the way you feel...

The cinematography and the technicolor make it beautiful to see, but as for enjoying the film, I didn't.

I wouldn't call it kitcsh, but the romance and jealousy therein, well, it did not work for me. (I fell asleep at first viewing, a disclosure I must make).

As for the entire picture, it was well written, acted, directed but it still just does not grab me.

Like it or no, I gotta say-- if this gorgeously photographed film is what you classify as kitsch, you have mighty high standards!

Elaborate on how exactly this film is "kitsch".

Its hardly overrated considering not everyone has seen it, but if you don't like it - you don't, each to their own.

Time rushes by
Love rushes by
Life rushes by
But the Red Shoes stay on

Well, if we want to get into cliched hackneyed stories there's always Sunrise, but it Murnau's artistic hands it becomes something great. No, I would not call The Red Shoes kitsch, nor would I call it overrated (a word which applies to Bringing Up Baby or Forrest Gump and the public's bewildering high regard for both of those).

If Red Shoes was the typical cliched triangle, Lermontov's interest in Vicky and reasons for wanting to take her from Julian would've been standard issue romantic or sexual interest in her, which is obviously not the case in this film.

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If you're watching 'Fullscreen' DVDs, you aren't getting the whole picture.

No, I don't and I think we should take you out behind the school and beat you with ballet shoes!

"A bit of musicality, PLEASE!" Strictly Ballroom

I'm a dancer and should worship and bow down at this film but quite frankly I find it unappealing. Overall, I find the production visually incoherent. Many of the sets are busy and cluttered. It's hard to know where to look, especially in the crowd scenes. Most of the acting is overdone and the story is contrived. Many of the costumes are also clumsy in the way they look on the actor's bodies as well as the way that they fail to work together as a whole in each scene. For example, and this is a little thing, early in the film Shearer is wearing a white tutu with blue trim and a different colored blue ribbon in her hair that does nothing for her hair and has no relationship at all to the blue trim on the tutu. The ribbon seems like an after thought, but ends up dominating the entire costume. This is just one example, but there are many

The acting reminds me of early silent films or cartoons. I see no chemistry happening between the actors at all, and Shearer's brash, red hair seems to conflict with everything, including her costumes and even her own face. The dancing is awkward, although standards have changed, it's still forced and stiff, except for Massine who transcends the trite, formulaic choreography with the startling honesty and brilliance of his attack.

Don't get me wrong, these are all brilliant artists, it's just that for me it lacks the synthesis of what makes all the elements of a film work together to form a cohesive whole. The whole should be greater than the sum of the parts, but in this case each part in isolation is greater than the sum of the whole.

Is it supposed to be realistic, or is it trying to create an alternate, fantasy world, like the fairy tale it comes from? Is it bringing a fairy tale to life or reducing real life artists to cartoonish, fairy tale clowns?

I would not call it kitsch, but I find the film haphazard and unsettling. If that was the director's intention, he fully succeeded with me.

I can't comment on other films by these directors, but I do agree that this is kitch, and I couldn't get into it either. I'm astonished that this currently gets an 8.2 on IMDb, when so many other films of that year are better but rated worse, including A Foreign Affair, The Snake Pit, and I'm sure quite a few others I haven't seen.

Kitch: an inferior tasteless copy, a worthless imitation, cheap mass-produced objects, aesthetically deficient, excessive sentimentality, executed to pander to popular demand alone and purely for commercial purposes, unsubstantial and gaudy

The best example of this is The Red Shoes ballet itself within the film. Rather than simply presenting the ballet as it would be, a number of cinematic effects and unnecessary clumsy edits (even in simple dance steps) are used to emphasize the story. If anyone on the stage can actually dance ballet for longer than 10 seconds at a time, it's not at all clear to the viewer. The special effects, such as the shoes magically being put on Victoria's feet, are just embarrassing, and prove that if you can't do it right, don't do it.

All of the characters are paper-thin -- barely even one-dimensional. It's astonishing and annoying that the film takes so long to tell us all a story we've seen so many, many, many times before.