Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

Megamind To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Steven Torrey I enjoyed the movie. Though I would be hard pressed to write a summary of Klimt's life after watching the movie. He is a Viennese artist who painted from Fin de Siècle to just before the end of the Great War. That says a lot to the viewer right there. That an artist is self-centered, self-destructive, self-involved should always be self-evident. That came through clearly in the film. If the multitudinous and pulchritudinous naked women say anything, it should suggest that Klimt is dying at a relatively young age of syphilis. The syphilis may have affected his brain--hence he speaks to people who are not present. (I don't know, by the by, whether Klimt did in fact die afflicted with syphilis; the biggest defect of this approach to film biography is the reliance of the viewer to interpret accurately what is going on. A reliance best not--well, to be relied on.)So the movie presents an impression of the artist being an impression of being an artist. Not especially helpful if you have no idea of what is going on with the artist.Alas, most movies about artists are less than stellar. There are those who hate "Amadeus" or "Immortal Beloved" for the same reasons they hate this move; the technique of the film is nothing more than a celebration of film technique and not an exposition on the artist. Maybe FRIDA was one of the more successful films about an artist and exposition of the artist that does not fall into technique.If you have a need for movies that are linear than you may not like this; if you don't mind the Fellini Saytryricon approach to movies, then this may be the movie for you. And I thought John Malkovich did indeed look like Gustave Klimt. A dead on resemblance.

swooned Just came across this film in passing while researching Stephen Dillane. Always interested in art films, I had hoped this would show some distinction, like Max (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290210/) or Basquait (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115632/), as examples that comes to mind now.For sure, Malkovich is the wrong choice. Instead of being a vehicle of eroticism, the women feel reduced to tools of his beckoning, something that has become prevalent in any role Malkovich plays. Add the emotional reactions to the establishment, etc, and it is all just the same deal of Malkovich being so so so cool, just in a different setting. Really boring.However sexy the film is meant to be, there is just no tension between the people involved. Everyone is acting, not being. Even Saffron, who is usually stunning, feels at odds with the material.Whatever people who love the film can say what the film is about, namely the relationships, I found nothing that shows Klimt's distinction as a man in this film.Malkovich is just too full of himself portraying how different everyone thinks he is to portray a central character of such depth. He is not playing Klimt. He is playing his perceived self. Boring boring boring. There is no soul in the character, and all the others, save Dillane, surprisingly, become soulless on the way.Bummer. There is no reference to the essence of the artist himself. Useless portrayal with nude girls. Should I care? Even Eyes Wide Shut showed women off better.

dromasca Gustav Klimt was a fascinating character. At a time when all modern art was going through one of the greatest transformations in history Klimt was slightly dislocated, or better said located at the wrong place. The elegant city of Vienna was living its last decades as the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and as much as it has been a center of music and refinement for the previous 150 years, it never was the home of great creation in plastic arts. The revolution was taking place in Paris, with strong resonance in the Netherlands, in Germany and even in Scandinavia. Vienna was adopting a more refined and processed version of the revolution and the art created here was still more targeting to please rather than scandalize les bourgeois.It is not very clear to me what director Raul Ruiz intended to show in this film. It does not seem to be about the artist Klimt, as we get very little feeling about what his art was about, where it came from, how it related to his character or with his environment. We are not even very clear about the character Klimt - we see him involved with a lot of women, trying to be a charmer just to fall under the charms (and mirror games) of the wrong woman (or maybe more than one). We get a mosaic image of the Vienna and Paris before the war, seen from the perspective of the dying Klimt and of his friend Schiele (Nikolai Kimski is excellent) - but overall the exercise seems to be pretentious and empty of content.Or maybe it was about giving John Malkovich the opportunity to make another great role. He did not need it, and actually for the first time I felt the great actor to be a little bit tired. It was more 20 years after playing another big Austrian artist, and the reason was not only the age.

tedg While the world relaxed and enjoyed itself between wars. When art was a solitary and experimental endeavor. When Europeans rediscovered the power of nature in sex and in some cases the other way around. When lives really could be deep, and debauched and intelligent too, three men came out of Vienna: Freud and Wittgenstein were two of them. There may have not been such a concentration of greatness for many decades before and until the Fasori Gimnázium, also under by then slippery Austrian rule. There's a commonality among those two and Klimt, and even between them and the more cerebral Budapest next generation. Its a matter of passion, sense (in both meanings) and concept curvature. While the two great art nouveau geniuses were wondering about space in Brussels and Barcelona, Klimt worked his space, curvature ans escape from the inside of women. Lots of women. His work is of that type that is immediately attractive, so lots of people decorate with it. A brief familiarity with it breeds confusion, so unless you dig as deeply in viewing as he did in making, it will not connect. As a result, if you are serious about making a film of him, about him, you simply cannot do the normal thing: somehow artificially inducing drama into portraying a few known events. You cannot do what Greenaway did with Rembrandt, simply showing sexual passion and making the film painterly.So along comes Ruiz, who is a strange bird, very much like Klimt. There's no middle familiarity with him. Either you know him deeply, you wrap your life where he has, or you miss the passion. You think him dull. You actually believe that someone would spend this much energy fine tuning the ordinary. Well, the thing about these three men is that they were their own worst critics. They all three created their own new worlds were none was before, worlds so perfect and pure anyone of lesser power would be unable to break them. Then they each turned on their own creation, finding and exploiting the weaknesses of their own creations, selves and now us. The art is not in the man but in how he made himself broken.Look at each of them and see the beauty in partial dismemberment. Ruiz denotes this at the beginning with otherwise inexplicable, powerful amputee sex. As with Ruiz' best work, people act as others, split selves, whores of themselves, auditors and bureaucrats of sex. Love must be dissymmetric. Narrative to have power must be a bit jagged inside, where you want to go.I admit, I think Malkovich was a bad choice. He really can be dull. But he is supposed to stagger through this, finding puddles of warm light, clean frames or open enclosure. The women are the thing, always the thing here and they are drawn well.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.