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Re: Frida a film

From:     blp
Category: Art
Date:     07 April 2007
Time:     10:33 AM

Review:

I liked it too. I thought Hayek was good and so was everyone else. The dinner scene with Leon Trotsky made me cry. The 
animated paintings worked and the whole thing was beautifully crafted visually and it seemed pretty gutsy of a Hollywood film to 
be so sympathetic to leftist characters. Late on, Kahlo even had a photo of Mao on her bedroom wall – something absolutely not 
necessary, except perhaps to show solidarity with Diego Rivera's wrangle, shown earlier, over a portrait of Lenin in an American 
murals.  

The accents were a problem, though, especially Geoffrey Rush as Trotsky and the actress who played Tina Modotti. How does 
this come about? Do actors think it's beneath them to learn the accent properly - something not to do with the real craft of acting? 
Or does the shooting schedule just not allow them the time? Anyway, it sucks, hard, and surely pisses off a lot of people. 

The other thing, even worse, that really make me feel I'm watching a crap film in spite of all merit, is stock dialogue, lines that 
always seem to turn up in the same context, doing the same dull job, lazily: 'It's good, Frida - very good.' 'She's lost a lot of blood.'  
etc. There was a lot of it. I can't even begin to imagine how this kind of stuff is allowed in. It's junk. Pure, unadulterated junk. 
Somewhat in the same vein were a lot of the usual trite, short-hand methods for dealing with artists and their lives – the highs! the 
lows! the intense late night discussions! I don't even mind it being gotten wrong – but in the same way every time? Still, not too 
much of that here. 


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