The Moderns

Rating:
Summary: Fun Film!
Review: This an entertaining, unassuming film, set in Paris of the 1920s. I have always liked films set around this time because they are fun in terms of their music, the style of dress, and their mood. This film loosely follows a struggling young artist (is there any other kind?) as he works on his craft in Paris. Along the way, you have great costumes and great tunes. I love the theme song played at the beginning of the film as well as that short "Da-Da" piece played in the middle. Linda Fiorentino supplies the flapper beauty and oh boy is she pretty! There are some historical figures that pop up in this movie, like a young Hemingway casting about in Paris, and they help to add to the flavour of the film. If you like films such as "Henry and June" or Jennifer Jason Leigh's Dorothy Parker film from the 1990s, then you should give this DVD a spin. You might enjoy it!

Rating:
Summary: Fun Film!
Review: This an entertaining, unassuming film, set in Paris of the 1920s. I have always liked films set around this time because they are fun in terms of their music, the style of dress, and their mood. This film loosely follows a struggling young artist (is there any other kind?) as he works on his craft in Paris. Along the way, you have great costumes and great tunes. I love the theme song played at the beginning of the film as well as that short "Da-Da" piece played in the middle. Linda Fiorentino supplies the flapper beauty and oh boy is she pretty! There are some historical figures that pop up in this movie, like a young Hemingway casting about in Paris, and they help to add to the flavour of the film. If you like films such as "Henry and June" or Jennifer Jason Leigh's Dorothy Parker film from the 1990s, then you should give this DVD a spin. You might enjoy it!

Rating:
Summary: A film with great style and mood.
Review: This is an outstanding film of elegant style, mood and atmosphere. It's also one of the best movies I've seen about painting. Carradine plays Nicholas Hart, a struggling, expatriot artist living in 1920's Paris. Linda Fiorentino plays Rachel, the beautiful wife who walked out on him in America for a more prosperous future. Now, she too is in Paris with Bertram Stone, her rich, dangerous and unloving husband (played by John Lone). Stone is intent on buying himself a world class art collection not for any love of painting but for the notoriety it brings. What he cannot control is the love that is reignited between Hart and Rachel, to disastrous and unexpected consequences. A parallel storyline has Hart being asked by his art dealer to forge three beautiful paintings by Cezanne and Modigliani for a rich Parisian woman intent on leaving her husband. The plan is to switch the real for the fake and depart for the United States where she will donate the paintings to a new museum, the New York Museum of Modern Art. Hart reluctantly agrees to copy the paintings, and we are treated to several lovingly done sequences inside his flat as he goes about his work with great care, intensity, and skill. Carradine, Fiorentino and Lone all put in very strong performances. But overshadowing them all is Kevin O'Connor as a young, serious, passionate and poetic Hemingway, who is Hart's friend and our link with the past. Alan Rudolph has created something very special here, a Paris straight out of our dreams, with warm and comfortable cafes, wet and narrow cobblestone streets, creaky artists flats, smokey voiced women, a Paris filled with creative spirit and those who have -- or want to make it -- the center of their lives. They were all so very modern! Also stylish and memorable is the score by Mark Isham.