Frida

Rating:
Summary: A Fluffy work of Fiction
Review: I don't know why I thought I might like this movie when I went to see it. It gets an F in three catagories

1. Historical accuracy - Yes there was a woman named Frida who was married to Diego and lived in Mexico, but that's where the history seems to end. Frida was actually a staunch Stalinist (the last painting she was working on when she died was of him) and only briefly flurted with Trotskyism (mostly when she was sleeping with Trotsky). Her husband was more than a cheat as he was also a wife beater, but I guess feminists can't have a hero that goes back to an abusive husband.

2. Artfulness - It tried way too hard. Making her paintings become animated was mostly awkward. The black and white with parts colored was poorly placed, sympolized nothing, and was used WAY too much.

3. Acting - All of it seemed forced and Hayek is the most over-rated actress this side of Halle Berry. I could never sympathize with the main character as half her troubles are her own making.

Over all, the tragedy in the movie is found in its dishonesty, not in its story.

Rating:
Summary: Transmutation at its finest.
Review: Born in Mexico in 1907 just prior to the beginning of the Mexican revolution, Frida Kahlo becomes an icon in the art world after being confined to her bed and forced to find an outlet from what must have been inconceivable pain and torture. She marries (twice) the famous muralist Diego Rivera who is played by Fred Molina--Rivera is best known for in the US for painting a mural for Rockafeller and having it torn down because he refused to take the image of Stalin out. At 6 Frida had been diagnosed with polio and suffered from a slightly malformed leg throughout her physically tortured life. Later, at around 17, she is in a city bus accident and a metal rod found its way through her abdomen and exited via the pelvic region. Because of all this Frida is at the mercy of well meaning surgeons throughout her life and suffers body casts, odd traction devices and surgeries which in that day might have seemed helpful. While being confined to her bed Frida's parents supply her with paint and canvas. That is where the history of Frida's art and the thick of the movie begins.

Selma Hayek plays the part of Frida Kahlo from youth to death. Sparsed in between the performances are hallucinogenic scenes which masterfully depict some of her more abstract representations. Although I felt the performances forced it did flow better during the 2nd half of the movie. In addition to the physical suffering she endured Frida also endured Rivera--she said there were two great accidents in her life and one of them was Diego. I wondered if the movie would depict much of the suffering Frida went through and that it does probably because Hayek produced the film herself. It also characterizes her (Frida) ideas of transmutation of sorts as it ran in her life as well. Perhaps the picture could have been aided by more attention to performance as I was left unconvinced in several places. I do believe Miss Hayek tried to convey Frida's lust for any joy in life and living it for its very base values. As the end approached I saddened knowing that this colorful, exuberant person had already passed years ago but was leaving again in a darkened theatre. Some people describe Frida's art as disturbing but once you see it from her perspective it changes into something very familiar to all of us.

If you enjoy music from the Mexican culture I highly recommend the sound-track. Even though I didn't understand many words the emotional addition of the music turned stoic scenes into moving resonation's.

Rating:
Summary: THE COLOR OF A COUNTRY, A NEIGHBOR AND A FRIEND
Review: There are several ways to look at FRIDA the movie. You can take into account how it rates as cinema, or you may consider the complexity of Kahlo's life and whatever aesthetic or emotional appeal that life might have for you. Then there may be something even more than that. Perhaps the movie is best seen as a tribute to Mexico itself.

I watched the movie as a fan of Frida Kahlo and, to tell the truth, even if it stunk as cinema I would like it because of the person whose marvelous life inspired it. Even more, it is very touching and delightful to have someone as talented and beautiful as Salma Hayek pour so much of herself (in more ways than one) into paying homage to a shared hero through the motion picture medium.

It may be blasphemy to say this, but Frida Kahlo's extraordinary life in many ways upstages her actual paintings which, for all their critical acclaim, can be very in-your-face and intimidating. I disagree that more time should have been given to the creation process itself as that aspect of an artist may be too intensely internalized to be filmable in a meaningful way. Given the chance they deserve, however, Kahlo's works lead one not only to the tormented soul of their creator but to the greater glories that are Mexico - and Mexico of the 1930s in particular.

(Many scenes make you want to run down to the local gardening center and buy up all their cacti.)

Even with a more generous budget, it would probably have been near impossible for FRIDA to emerge from the cutting room in some form other than that which the world has grown to expect from Hollywood. We have to face the sad fact that movies are a business and I know of no one who makes movies deliberately to lose money. No doubt FRIDA will help introduce the life of Frida Kahlo to many thousands around the world through this stunning and tasteful 'commodification' of an artist's life.

The great success of FRIDA is that it was made at all. As a Frida fan I do not want to make much of its faults. Indeed, the producers have given us a great cinematic salute to the aethetic sensibilities of the Mexican tradition, many times more beautiful and complex than anything rendered by the brush of a single artist.

Rating:
Summary: ****
Review: Do I like Frida? Most of it yes I do. I think is a great achievement for Salma Hayek not only as an actress but as a producer, she cooked this project with so much care and time that she deserves a big cheer (Maybe all the love she felt for this project and for Frida Khalo made her ease things about her life).

This is a well - crafted film, beautifully shot. Mexico has never looked so beautiful in a film like in this one, is filled with the marvelous Mexican culture, habits and places. The moving paintings are just breath taking and Julie Taymor's direction is good must of the time, I just think that she should have done the same kind of shots and editing through all the film, it gets wild sometimes and others don't. Is not unanimous if you know what I mean, the other bad part is the screenplay, it went for so many screenwriters that it gets confusing and once again is not the same picture all of the time, it's obvious that is not a screenwriter personal project, it has many empty spaces and it falls in the middle part of the film, it starts so well (the streetcar crash is just amazing followed by the shot were Hayek is laying filled with blood and golden dust) then it falls and gets great again at the end.

Salma Hayek's performances is strong, maybe not the best performance of the year but she shows with this film that she can be a great actress she just needs time, the strongest part of her acting lays in the point that she really made me believe that she was Khalo and not Salma acting. Alfred Molina is also great as Diego Rivera, the other actors can't make a solid performance because they're almost like cameos, I've read some reviews about the film saying that Ashley Judd is misscasted as Tina Modotti, but I think she is beautiful and she gives a decent performance.

Overall this is a good enjoyable film, with good acting, a great (oscar winning!) score, and the cinematography, costumes and art direction are just beautiful. Everyone should go and watch it to know a little about this woman's life and work. And maybe you fall in love with Khalo and want to know more about her after this film just like I did.

Rating:
Summary: Ambition and Ego get in the way of a beautiful movie
Review: Salma Hayek wants you to believe that absolutely everything about FRIDA, from the production and script on down to the catering and flower arranging, was her doing (or that of her real-life boyfriend Edward Norton)... but that Personal Mythology would be a lot easier to swallow if she hadn't hired Julie Taymor to direct.

If Disney's THE LION KING proved anything, it proved that Taymor -- who directed the wildly successful Broadway stage version of that movie -- can be bought; but when you buy her, the project ceases to be yours and becomes completely her own.

Taymor is gifted, clever, fearless and well versed in every theatrical technique. Her work, always, is beautiful and caustic in about equal quantities, and she has made the leap from stage to film with confidence and an authoritative grasp of the medium from the get-go.

But there have been problems. The avowed intention of TITUS, her first big-budget feature, was to demonstrate that violence has consequences and causes pain, whereas Hollywood has glamorized it and desensitized us as a people to the point where we can accept it unthinkingly on our TV screens and in our homes. In theory this is all well and good, but in the process of shoehorning this message into Shakespeare, something went wrong. Bad enough that Taymor literally offered up The Three Stooges as the Root of All Evil, but to go on as she did to make her point within the Art House equivalent of a Hershel Gordon Lewis movie is at best Soft Thinking. Forced to find beauty in images of dismemberment and gore, Taymor became the very thing she was being critical of.

So I was looking forward to FRIDA as a vindication of Taymor's ability, and to a great extent I was not disappointed. This is a movie of striking beauty and one that delivers on its aim, which is nothing less than to show that pain, art and life are different masks on the same face. The problem here is not Taymor's.

This is a movie in conflict: on the one hand you have Hayek (who is one of the film's producers) delivering a very Self Determined and self conscious Career Making Performance, almost literally grasping at the screen for attention, and on the other hand you have Taymor's eerily detached movie about art and suffering. The two are not wholly compatible: you sense that Hayek would like this to be a conventional movie, that she resents anything that diverts our attention from her own gleaming self image. And gleam she does: Taymor knows how to photograph her and delivers cheesecake worthy of a glamour magazine that undermines the film's more personal imagery, and flies in the face of reality: the real Frieda Kahlo was nowhere near as affectedly pretty as Hayek is in this movie.

It would grieve Hayek to learn that the real Acting star of the movie is Alfred Molina as the muralist Diego Rivera, Mexico's 1930's equivalent of a Rock star. His Rivera is a gigantic, petulant little boy, with a little boy's charm. He is believable in the part for the same reason that Hayek is not: because he successfully puts aside Alfred Molina.

Other supporting players are also strong, especially including Roger Rees and Ashley Judd; but Geoffrey Rush disappoints as Leon Trotsky and damages the movie in consequence: his scene with Hayek atop a Mayan ruin is absolutely key, and he botches it painfully.

All of which makes FRIDA sound messier and more damaged than it is. By any reasonable standard this movie is a six or seven out of ten, well worth seeing for the sights and sounds of perfect beauty and the things on its mind that are worth expressing, which alone put it above the level of the average Hollywood movie. But Hayek and Taymor are both strong-willed women: and the two cooks seem to have had very different designs for the finished project.

Rating:
Summary: VIVA FRIDA!!
Review: I am a HUGE fan of Frida Kahlo. When I found out a few years ago that they were trying to make this movie, I was SO excited! No one, and I mean no one, could have played this role better than Salma! She was absolutely brilliant. The heart, soul and passion she put into this project I believe would have made Frida extremely proud if she were alive today.

I promise you, this movie is one to own.

Rating:
Summary: This film is for adults only!
Review: Selma Hayek may have produced this film so she could star as the Mexican artist (who was one of the wives of Diego Rivera in 1922), but it was a classic. She was a delight in FOOLS RUSH IN, the movie for which my favorite MYL person, Chuck Southcott, served as music consultant. His choices of 'our type' of music fit perfectly with the situations.

In the six years since this earlier fun frolic of a strange marriage, she's developed into an outstanding (award-worthy) actress. Ashley Judd was okay as Tina.

It was exquitely photographed. The pyramids of Mexico lent a touch to the atmosphere present at that time. They were so different from the flappers of the USA, even after she mutilated her hair and had a bob. She had funny looking eyebrows. If only she had plucked them as well, she would have been a beauty.

Some of the dialogue such as "I don't have time to chat; don't have time to fool around," leads one to wonder if things have really changed much in eighty years. She was told to be specific in her original paintings and considered loyalty more important than fidelity.

The Spanish dance was strange but effective. She'd be the best actress to portray Mata Hari as she could be made up to perform the "original" Spanish dance like M.H. did. She had a strange sense of humor, but some of her abstract art was gruesome, as with the fetus in a jar. She always wanted to be her own person but continually called herself a cripple.

Her tumultous twelve years of marriage to Diego proves that "marriage is a battlefield." Diego was a womanizer, which she knew from the beginning, and both had multiple partners. Amazingly, she had affairs with women. But her most notable was with the Russian Trotsky who told her he had few friends and no resources. He did have a sad wife. She was clearly fascinated with his intelligence.

Some think that accidents happen for a purpose. She stated that she had two accidents, that in the trolley and Diego -- you are the worse, she told him. He always proclaimed that "she made me come to her." When they came to New York to do some panels for Nelson Rockefeller, he said they were influenced by newspaper hacks. He was dismissed because he refused to adjust his principles; "I will not compromise my vision," he declared. He was such a crude man to be with an elegant woman.

Her adult life was filled with pain and a deep sadness after their split, seemed to go a little insane. I'd rather have an intelligent enemy than a stupid friend," she said on one occasion. Life with Diego was sordid to fit the times, she described him as a "Communist pig" painter of nudes. While watching the movie KING KONG, she compared him with her husband. He told her, "I don't believe in God but thank him everyday for you."

The peacock added some color at the start of the the movie, later she had a pet monkey and such a funny-looking dog. The revolving door reminded me of all those in Chicago. Though the actor who played Alex, Diego Luna, was on screen a short time, he was memorable. I think I recognized the party girl/entertainer from the movie of MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL as he/she performed a non-Spanish song.

At the exhibit of her artwork in her native country, Diego stated "never before has a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas." Though she was bedridden, having lost a leg, she wore rings on every finger and had that marvelous smile. She went out in a blaze of fireworks.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliance ..every step of the way..thats FRIDA for u !
Review: Frida is the astonishing and beautifully mounted movie biography on the famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Vibrantly brought to life by Salma Hayek, wh has long sought over this as her dream project, it is an in-depth and uncanny portrait of a woman and an artist ahead of her time. The film effortlessly spans from her life as a youth, to her debilitating bus accident, to her despair and success and her joyful exit in 1954 when she died at the age of 47.
Survived by her husband, artist Diego Rivera, their art prevailed over time as cultural milestones that have been internationally celebrated.
As an artist, Frida Kahlo found beauty in imperfections and practiced surrealism that was both provocative and striking. Often counterpart to her critics' assessments, Frida was a unique individual, fiercely opinionated and strong-willed. Director Julie Taymor vividly articulates the inspirations that passed through Frida's life, blending color pictures and color animation, black and white dream reality with black and white newsreel footage, all with fiesta-flavored boldness. Frida is illuminated for us to show how the inspiration of art was reflected in her vision, taking us beyond the step of mere observation. We see Frida through her own eyes, the fire in her artistic process.
Not particularly self-confident in her abilities at the beginning, Frida sought out Diego Rivera (played remarkably by Alfred Molina) to assess her talent. "I'm not asking you if you think I'm good. I'm asking you if I should continue painting," Frida tells him. They instantly become friends and then lovers, but Diego is forefront about his womanizing and infidelities. Frida accepts his behavior and marries him anyway, against all better judgment. When an art exhibit takes Diego to the States for the first time, Frida insists that she join him instead of being the typical wife held back home. Diego surrenders to cultural assimilation while Frida is left uninterested and detached by American politics that she can't identify with. When Diego takes a paid assignment from Nelson Rockefeller (Edward Norton) to paint a mural, he refuses to remove a communist reference in his work and is persuaded to return home.
While Frida and Diego shared the same views on politics, even boarding Russian communist Leon Trotsky in Mexico while they hid him from bounty assassins, they couldn't find appeasement together because of Diego's wandering imprudence. The rage between them escalates until they decide to separate, and Frida begins to have greater concentration on her own personal career. Frida took lovers both male and female, unashamed of experimenting in both her art and her life. Her signature mustache and unibrow were also a signature of her dual nature - two women named Frida that shared the same heart if diversified by separate, contrasting desires and contrasting identities, (she dressed as a man with a mousratche on occassions) But her undying devotion ultimately belonged to Diego, and despite their resentment for each other they came to realize that they needed each other most because their hearts were connected by ties of shared identity.
The film is also superbly cast with supporting players. Geoffrey Rush makes an elegant Leon Trotsky, Roger Rees is intuitive as Frida's father, and Valeria Golina is ravishing as Diego's spurned first wife. The one embarrassing casting mistake is with Ashley Judd who is supposed to play a well-respected Mexican photographer. Her overblown, fiery ethnic delivery is disruptive, but is thankfully limited to a few scenes. It would be excusable if Ashley Judd was cast because she was a big, established star name in order to help Frida get financed. Then the compromise would be warranted. But if that wasn't the case then casting Ashley Judd should have been, by all means, avoided.
But the film survives the small casting mistake because the rest of the production is a grand achievement. This is a film made with a bold palette of colors and is a rich testament to the mystifying beauty of Mexico. Hayek is gutsy and sensational in the lead role, always sizzling with heart, breadth and personality. This is something of a remarkable turnaround for the actress after long being pigeon-holed in cliched ethnic roles. Hayek is remaking her persona and announcing her acting capabilities in the same way that Halle Berry reinvented herself with Monster's Ball last year. There is courageous beauty in her performance as in Frida's art. Because of Hayak's diligence to get this movie made, Frida Kahlo will be immortalized even beyond the fine art community into the heart of Oscar Hollywood.
Speaking of Oscars, one of the best things about Hayek's searing performance is that it doesn't have Oscar-acclaim written all over it (though she certainly deserves a nod). She doesn't just act Frida, she inhabits her. Her portrayal is as tender as it is ferocious, as sensitive as it is commanding.
This is not a happy story and does not have an upbeat ending. What it does have is the spontaneous energy of the Mexican culture, and those noisy colors celebrating in the tropical sun that fills the courtyards and colonial architecture of Spanish explorers from centuries past.
There is no triumph, but there is much determination in the actual story as in the plot of the movie. Salma Hayek must get two thumps up for her brilliant portrayal of a courageous, strong headed, passionate and vibrant woman in the movie.
When Frida is finally granted an exhibition in her homeland, Hayek and the director can't help but come to mind as Rivera introduces her work, saying, "I don't believe ever before has a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas." Or so beautifully, on screen.
The hardest part about "Frida" is the film's length. It feels long as it constantly keeps batting at her tortured existence with and without Diego (her husband) . I really enjoyed a lot of Frida but the last 5 minutes really didn't harness a solid ending, infact they left a strange sense of vagueness on the directors part.
Otherwise, Frida is this year's most captivating and passionate film.

Rating:
Summary: Delicious chocolate covered peanuts...and "Frida"
Review: Director Julie Taymor's film at times contains stunning cinematography and a broad imaginative merge of Frida Kahlo's art and motion picture, but in the foreground of those rare moments lies a truly flat cliché-filled biopic. For a woman who seemed to live an artistically and politically complex existence, her life is displayed in a conventionally uncomplex Hollywood-esqe manner. The film is carried by manipulative music cues and cameos that distract the focus and force us to be entertained (a tactic that seems all to familiar in Hollywood). Salma Hayek does a fine job, but is surrounded by caricatures of her friends and family and Americans bombastically portraying English speaking foreigners; see Ashley Judd. Near the end we are witnessed to a montage of Frida and her decaying body and soul accompanied by a sappy music score who's ultimate goal is to moisten our eyes (tactic #2). This is proof that "Frida" is nothing more than another product of the Hollywood factory that produces accessibly bland external portraits. This is quite a letdown considering how inventive and creative Taymor's film adaptation was of Shakespeare's "Titus". Experience the film "Before Night Falls" about Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas for a more productive depiction of a provocative artist on film. The one star rating is for the delicious box of "Goobers" I consumed while watching the film.

Rating:
Summary: SIMPLY BEAUTIFUL
Review: I was taken back by surprise this afternoon while watching this spectacular film protraying the life of the Mexican surrealist artist of Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek). I now wonder why I neglected to see FRIDA earlier as it has been playing at a local cinema for many weeks. But what I can say for sure is that I was the one who missed out by not enjoying it sooner. The chronological events of Frida's life are brilliantly combined with images of her paintings actually coming to life on the screen and becoming an independent entity apart from their creator. One can view many autobiographical elements of Frida's life that were included in her artwork. I sympathized with Frida for the obstacles she had to face, including being seriously injured in a trolley accident that left her handicapped. With that being said, I felt no sympathy for her when her husband, Diego Riveria, cheated on her since she was well aware of his 'habits' when she married him. Frida naively believed that Diego would change. In addition to Salma Hayek's excellent performance, the cinematography of Mexico City and the Mayan ruins are very well done. This film captures beautiful Mexico City when it was often known as the 'Paris of the New World' during the first half of the 20th century. I highly recommend FRIDA but don't make my mistake, see it now before it leaves the theater and you won't regret it.