Word: frida
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...budget movies like Frida and Igby Goes Down tend to grace the marquees...
...Frida Kahlo, the Mexican surrealist-communist painter, lived her life in ghastly pain, the result of a crippling accident. But pain, though knowable, is also indescribable. Alas, Frida is one of those chipper biopics in which the heroine (Salma Hayek) cheerfully endures her suffering while incidentally creating her art and carrying on her endlessly tormented love affair with the muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). The result is a trivializing movie, especially disappointing because it was directed by Broadway's lionized Julie Taymor (The Lion King). Her first theatrical film, Titus, was distinguished by a bold and visionary sweep. In Frida...
...narrative, Frida works fine. The major events in her extraordinarily interesting life are shown in painstaking detail, from her misadventures as a young and idealistic student to her much-famed visit to New York for Rivera’s commission from Nelson Rockefeller. Most of the time, however, these details fly by with little investment, as Taymor attempts grandeur but ends up with only a bulging detachment...
...flaw that colors everything in the film, however, is Taymor’s hesitant and wobbly direction. While the ballsy Titus knew well that it was visually arresting and never forgot, Frida oscillates nervously between an intense visual palette and boring displays of ho-hum period cinematography and horrendously contrived narrative set-ups that bore more than they evoke. Early in the film, the trolley crash that renders Kahlo periodically unable to walk is shot and edited with a shocking visceral quality and a brash artistic confidence. Immediately after, Taymor gives us a shamelessly trippy, grotesque animated sequence that quite...
...this film is willing to realize, imitated her life in more interesting ways than Taymor shows us. When the paintings are shown on screen, only the most manipulated audience member would not want to be transported to some far-off gallery, where perhaps we can enter the world of Frida Kahlo without the distracting influence of dramatic contrivance...