@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:Ill start with afairly good movie about Francisco Goya called GOYA"S GHOSTS. In this movie Goya is actually a secondary character and it actually follows the life of one of his models. It comes full circle like a Coen brothers movie so it is somewhat predictable in the end.BUT ya gotta wait for the denoument. Id give it a solid 3 stars out of four
I saw
Goya's Ghosts and had an entirely different reaction. Goya came off as a profoundly uninteresting character, which is strange considering that he lived a fairly interesting life. The story itself is as fresh as a Horace Walpole novella: bad man seduces and destroys innocent, virginal girl and then gets his comeuppance. Ho hum.
I also saw
Little Ashes not too long ago. It's Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, and Federico Garcia Lorca and their kooky collegiate hijinx. Robert Pattinson of
Twilight fame shows that, when he's not being a dreamy-eyed vampire, he genuinely can't act. Another film that takes artists who led interesting lives and turns them into whining emo dullards.
In general, films haven't really done a good job capturing the lives of artists, painters, and sculptors. I'm not sure why that is.
Pollock , for instance, has a good performance by Ed Harris, but it's just another movie about some self-destructive genius -- this one happens to throw paint on canvases. Maybe movies haven't been very successful with artist biopics is because the craft of art is rather uninteresting -- who wants to watch someone paint a portrait or sculpt a statue? -- which leaves only the story of "the tortured genius," which we've seen a thousand times before.
