Frida

Rating:
Summary: Bland and Empty Film, Typical Hollywood Junk
Review: After hearing about all the grandeur that this film would convey, I was looking forward to seeing the attempt to put the life of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo onto the screen but I also came in with healthy skepticism. This was a big disappointment, not only is there nothing important stated in the film, but the acting is absolutely horrible.

It was an understatement to say that this was pure "torture" to people who want to be intellectually stimulated or at least watch a decent film about someone's life without resorting to that fact that the director wanted us to see Frida as nothing but a "hero and martyr" and a one dimensional character, which is what is conveyed throughout this awful film. Julie Taymor (a pretentious playwright and puppet maker w/ one film to her credit) instead gives us a Hollywood cliche about the artist's life, including meaningless pseudo-surrealist interjections which bring to life some of the paintings in a boring fashion.

Hayek is tepid, stale and dull and never really brings any vividness or passion into one of the most vibrant artists of the century, instead, we get to see her breasts about 20% of the time, not that I am against that, but a film should be about something more important that conventional sex scenes which have no point being on the screen and give us feelings into the art and life and relationship with Rivera (played by the dismal Alfred Molina).

Taymor is unsure whether she wants to actually let us examine Kahlo's life or merely show us a predictable storyline that doesn't fit anywhere, she meanders through the most "famous" episodes in Frida's life, including her horrific accident and sprinkles a few twists and interpretations. She has a turbulent relationship with Rivera but again, no souls are studied. Trotsky (played by the laughable Geoffrey Rush with a bad Russian accent) has no meaning at all, instead he is nothing but a sex toy which was disgusting to behold on the screen. We feel as if we are watching a bunch of idiots on the screen because not one of the actors hired for this film show any enthusiasm or any acting capabilities, although Antonio Banderas as the artist Siqueiros is the closest thing but he is given only about 2 minutes to work.

Painting was an important part of Frida's life but we don't really get to even see her at work here. If you are looking for a literary study of the artist, this is most definately not the place to look. This is a tragic disgrace to the artist, and merely a conventional approach that gives rich Americans, who compromise 97% of the film audience, a chance to say that they know Frida after watching this. After all, it was the American upper middle class that co-opted Frida's works and life and called it their own, to put on t-shirts and mugs. What is sad, as I saw while reading the other reviews of this film, is that people won't know that nothing was actually stated in the film because they are accustomed to mindless Hollywood garbage which just wants to take famous names and make more money so we have people calling this "brilliant and wonderful". I think a Mexican director with decent actors who know their craft is what is necessary if you really want to make a respectable and credible. This film was not even worth making it is so bad.


Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Bio-Pic
Review: Frida is one of the best films about someone's life I've seen in a long time. Usually such films tend to be self involved or leave out important details. With Frida there is a good mix of everything.

The visuals of the film are striking and in some places unique in the way it shows Frida's paintings almost coming to life. Her relationship with Muralist Diego Rivera is shown exactly how it was: harsh, violent but passionate. In the end, despite the infidelity of both husband and wife numerous times, their enduring love and respect for each other as artists and comrades out lasted any lingering problems they had.

Alfred Molina and Selma Hayek give truely great performances and fit their characters personalities well. I hadn't been a huge fan of Selma before this film but even though I'm still not, her acting here has proven me that when given the right material, she can be just as good an actress as the best of them.

The music present in the film is gripping and soaring. The voice of singer Lila Downs cutting through triumphantly. The traditional Mexican music is well done and a joy to listen to. In the end I highly recommend this film on all fronts: acting, music, direction, plot and cinematography.

Rating:
Summary: "Acid and tender, hard as steel, fine as a butterfly's wing"
Review: Artist Frida Kahlo's paintings are a visual diary of her life--as a revolutionary, as the wife of Diego Rivera, and as a woman in constant pain. Injured in a bus accident as a young woman, she endured over thirty surgeries, unremitting physical agony, and injuries which left her unable to bear a child, but she also endured the pain of a notoriously unfaithful husband. As she once told him, "There were two big accidents in my life. You are the worst."

Salma Hayek, as Frida, is both tough and vulnerable, showing Frida's spontaneous, physical approach to life and her passionate dedication--to Diego, to her hard-edged paintings, and to communist philosophy. Alfred Molina, as Diego, a man who "belongs only to himself," is warm, funny, often protective, and utterly impossible as a husband. An established muralist with many commissions when he first meets her, he encourages her artistic goals, explaining, "I paint what I see--the world outside. You paint from your heart." Married, divorced, and later remarried, Frida and Diego, as we see them here, are both mutually supportive and mutually destructive.

Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida is the basis for the Clancy Sigal and Diane Lake screenplay, which emphasizes Frida's pain and her ways of dealing with it--through drink, her work, and through sex, with both women and men, including Leon Trotsky, in exile in Mexico. The settings from the 1920s and 1930s are brilliantly colorful--a bright blue house with a garden of peacocks, monkeys, and colored birds; the worksites of Rivera's passionate and brightly colored murals; and locations in Mexico City and New York. Lively Mexican music plays throughout, with new music (Elliot Goldenthall) inserted to unify scenes, the piano music being especially memorable. The cinematography (Roderigo Prieto) takes full advantage of the architecture and the color, which is enhanced by the vibrant clothing, jewelry, and hair adornments worn by Frida.

Director Julie Taymor features many of Frida's paintings, and some of Diego Rivera's murals throughout, using them to connect the artists' inner and outer worlds. On several occasions, however, there are jarring intrusions of cartoons and nightmares--people walk through a photograph, which shifts to black and white; King Kong in a film morphs into Diego Rivera; a trip to New York becomes a walk through travel brochures. Unfortunately, the style of these vignettes is so unexpected and foreign to the tone of this film that they feel intrusive, even arch. Hayek and Molina are outstanding in conveying the torment of Frida and Diego Rivera, however, and the film, overall, is a fascinating study of two artists living through the tumult of history and each other. Mary Whipple


Rating:
Summary: Portrait of an Artist-Lush and in Pain
Review: I missed Frida in the theatres, and I'm sorry I did. The performances by all the principals are amazing, but it's the lush cinematography and production elements that set it all off like the velvet cloth used to make sure a precious gem is framed without any distractions to take the eye away. The extras give each of the collaborators a chance to show off what they are so justly proud of.

Watching the commentary track re the music before I viewed the movie itself was a good choice. It made me more aware of the musical elements-particularly the Spanish language ones.

Elliot Goldenthal's score is phenomenal-capturing the soul of a culture with deep wounds and even deeper joy and vibrance.

Filmed in Mexico, as seems only fitting for such Mexican cultural icons, the movie also ignites a love affair for me with the Mexican culture that I got little peeks at growing up in Az. Time to brush up my Spanish, I think.

Rating:
Summary: An Evocative Intersection of Art, Life, and Politics
Review: Knowing what the rest of the 20th century was to bring, it's very hard for us to look back and comprehend that enigmatic period between the World Wars in all its contradictory impulses. The lives of artists during periods of transition are often the most illuminating distillations of those contradictory impulses. So it was with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who stood at the crossroads of so many forces and events -- Trotsky's fleeing the descent of communism into terrorism, the art of social realism foundering on the demands of its capitalist patrons, the uneasy compromises of conservative Latin culture with the undercurrents of its inherent sensuality.

This movie virtually throbs with the colors, sounds, and urgent seekings of an era that knew an old world had ended and that a new one was trying to be born. It was a prolonged birthing, and we now know it was to bear a demon. Artists seem more attuned to the forebodings of disaster than the rest of us, and this brooding sense of impending doom is the palpable shadow that dances over the vivid color, boisterous motion, and fleeting joys of Frida Kahlo's life.

This movie has its flaws, but they pale into insignificance against its achievement in evoking the sense of an era that has never been satisfactorily explained by historians or social scientists. You can add up all the things that went wrong between World War I and World War II. You can take a stab at cause and effect. You can blame the winners or the losers of World War I. But it's one of those eras for which you simply had to have been there to grasp what it was all about. Two movies have helped us get there. "Cabaret" was one. "Frida" is the other. It's quite an achievement.