April 2010 Archives
Frida (2002)
Where do I start (I am a little out of practice in writing reviews, sorry for being gone for so long). I really liked this movie so much, I watched it while I was on vacation with my Mom. It’s about Frida Kahlo, from when she was a student and got into a really bad accident, to when she dies when she’s 47. She was a painter who lived in the 1920s in Mexico City, Mexico and was married to Diego Rivera, another painter. The movie was directed by Julie Taymor, who I really like too. It had a lot of guest stars like Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton, Ashley Judd, and Alfred Molina. The soundtrack was incredible and had people on it like Chavela Vargas, who was close to the real Frida Kahlo when she was still alive.
The accident that Frida gets into happens on a trolley car. It crashes which breaks her spine and breaks her legs and makes it so she can’t have children. Her family doesn’t think she will ever walk again. Because she is in bed recovering, she starts painting. Then, she starts to get some paintings together and takes them to for Diego Rivera to see. Rivera was the most famous painter of that time, and he had a lot of influence. He was also a communist and he’d been married twice and had lots of affairs.
They fall in love, and get married. They have a really interesting life. They travelled all over the place like New York and Paris. They paint a lot together, and apart. They also They both have a lot of affairs with other people on the side, too. This means that they break up, for example Diego had an affair with Frida’s sister and that made them divorce. They also let Trotsky stay with them when he is on the run from Stalin.
Throughout the whole movie, Frida is sick. She gets sicker and sicker, and finally has to stay in bed all the time. I think the main point I got from this movie is that just because you maybe have an accident, that is not an excuse not to live a really interesting and full life. If Frida can live like this from her bed, we can all decide to have lives that are worth the time. No matter the type, start enjoying yourself.
-Plum
picture from lovefilm.com
A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints (2006)
I really really loved this film; it’s about how hard it is to grow up, and about how much harder growing up is when you can’t really express yourself and you’re living in a tough neighbourhood. It reminds me of another movie called This is England that I wrote about, because it seems like there are a lot of films out there by young directors about growing up in the 80s and showing what it was like to be a young man then based on themselves.The director’s name was Dito Montiel, and he wrote a book about his life that has the same name, and he made it into a movie. The actors that play him in this movie are Robert Downey Jr. as as man and Shia LeBoef as a teenager.
This movie is about a group of teenagers that are growing up in NYC in the 80s. The 80s in New York were pretty rough, most people think, because there was a lot of things going on in the city that were hard to deal with. There was crime, and some of the kids had abusive parents, and some of them had parents that weren’t really involved in their lives or couldn’t really help their kid because they were going through a lot of stuff themselves.
At the beginning of the movie, Dito was hanging out with a group of friends that were really negative. He had friends who are interested in just getting girls and fighting and hanging out. A typical Friday night for them would be for one of them to throw knives at their girlfriends. This was the only life Dito knew and it was really interesting because he didn’t really like it but he didn’t know there was anything else.
Then, Dito met a new kid at school. It was a Scottish kid named Mike who had just moved to NYC. The kid had a dog walking job and Dito went along. His friend Mike also had lots of ideas about things they could do, or fun ways to spend their time, or ways to learn, or ways to do more stuff. So, Dito started hanging out with Mike more and getting influenced by his positivity. Mike had seen more of the world and he knew that the only thing in the world wasn’t the Bronx.
As the movie goes on, things started getting worse and worse. One of his friends was hit by a train and killed when he was just playing around. Dito also had this guy who kept threatening to beat him up and kill him because of little things, so he was really nervous. I don’t want to say too much, but things get really bad for Dito, and he doesn’t seem to be able to get a lot of information on why, or what it’s all for. He decides he wants to leave his old life behind, cause it’s full of pain.
So, Dito decides he wants to go to California. He says he’s had enough of New York cause he can’t breathe amd everything goes wrong. So he leaves and doesn’t come back. And the movie is about him looking back on that time in his life.
I don’t know why the movie is called A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, but it’s probably the best movie I have seen in 2010.
-Plum
picture from novaczik on picasaweb
