:: Omnia Mutantur ::

:: Friday, January 24, 2003 ::

Art is personal

I can't believe it could possibly be any other way. Either you're creating something that comes from deep within you, or you're just going through the motions, hoping the end result will be accepted.

That is exactly the reason why Frida fails miserably: it never attempts to make any connection - other than the superficial, obvious ones - between Frida Kahlo's life and her work; even worse, it actually leaves her art aside for the sake of pursuing safe annecdotes that viewers can laugh at and that give filmmakers a chance of showing naked women.

Julie Taymor's style provides for some extremely powerful moments (Chavela Vargas singing Llorona in the tabern raised the hairs on the back of my neck), but style is all this movie has going for it. At its best it's a dull biography, going into tiny unimportant details of Kahlo's life; at worst it preaches to the choir, never quite explaining why her art was important, the effect she caused or how strongly and effortlessly she defied the conventions of the time. The story never even tells you what year events are ocurring, which makes it impossible for anyone who doesn't already know Kahlo's life to notice how against the grain her actions were.

On their obsession to recreate Frida Kahlo's style with make up and body painting on the actors, the movie forgets its subject. It loses the whole point of the exercise.

Biographies, like art, should be personal.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 12:09 AM [+] ::
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Where to we go now?

Just a small bit of news. I'm going to focus this blog in more personal things (including my stories and photographs), and will probably have a separate one for technology issues. Whether if I'll keep notes about recent movies here is still undecided, but I might.

If you just got here from my old site, you might be looking for where everything is. Try the links at the top of this page, or these others here:

• RPG resources


• Walker in the Wastes


• Opifex Bi-Monthly: Random Universes archive


• Some extremely out of date Creatures stuff, which I may be removing in the near future


• Several documents, including my thesis on Open Source development in Costa Rica

Take care.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 9:21 AM [+] ::
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Omnia Mutantur

Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 11:03 AM [+] ::
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