Glenn Gould - Extasis

Rating:
Summary: So you want to write a bad fugue
Review: Ceaseless talking heads spend 60 unnecessary minutes attempting to sell you the Idea of Gould.

Rating:
Summary: Talk too much
Review: I guess this film originally comes from a French program featuring an introduction to Glenn Gould. Each track begins with a very short excerpt of Gould's playing, then following by tons of different people's comments. However the program is unbalanced - around 90% of the time it is about talking, and as a result you cannot enjoy Gould's playing here (well, except the bonus part). Worse, each individual only gives a short talk for around 10~20 seconds, so you are not going to hear a seriously deep comments either.

I do not recommend this film to people who already know quite much about Gould, nor to those who buy dvd for watching Gould's playing.

Rating:
Summary: A candidate for Project Greenlight
Review: This apparently made-for-Canadian television spectacle resembles nothing so much as an experimental student film, with its love of elementary thematic tricks such as animation and fade-outs. The juxtaposition of several Gouldian images as well as commentary from acquaintances at once was particularly irritating. Perhaps the creators were trying to mimic Gould's "contrapuntal radio" schematics, in which several voices were broadcast simultaneously, but each time a shot appeared of Gould spouting off about something, it would be replaced by another image, and the sound of the former would be cut off. This disappearing talking head was vexing, because I wanted to hear the rest of Gould's speech about whatever had fascinated him at that moment. Of course, I knew I wouldn't be able to hear everything, but this tease happened so often, at the conclusion of the disc, I snapped off the machine feeling peevish. The occasional factual error was also distracting--Gould was 31, not 32, when he retired from the stage; he had not yet celebrated his birthday for the year in which he performed his last concert. While this may be a silly point, one would like factual inaccuracies to be airbrushed out of a production such as this, believing that some resourceful fact-checker would have taken the time to look up dates and places to ensure that the announcer doesn't make an unnecessary error. The animation, to which I alluded earlier, is sophomoric and pointless. Why must we have dancing dots gamboling in the corner of the frame while he plays? (Yes, I know some of Gould's own productions for Canadian TV featured these inanities, but haven't we progressed since then?) The entire DVD is constructed on the premise that we want to listen to a bunch of people talk about what a genius Gould was (we know already). I cannot highly recommend this disc, but I refuse to seriously caution anyone against its purchase. Even after viewing it, with all the reservations listed here (and then some), I admit that I would buy it again. Sadly, I'm that big a Gould fan. A much better buy? The Russian Journey (more talking head commentary about how marvelous he was, but much more interesting).