Little Ashes (2009)

Such a disappointing performance. Dalí was a complicated figure, but the way Pattinson played it, was was almost a caricature. And a bad one. Beltran's performance was better but didn't make up for Pattinson. The story, was hard to follow and the sound was awful. Never good when the music is so loud, one can't hear the dialogue.

a love story. with different levels. because it is not exactly episode from Salvador Dali's early years but a delicate sketch about the spirit of a part of Europe in the Belle Epoque. Garcia Lorca by Javier Beltran is one of the great virtues of film. not only for the physical resemblance but for the precise delicacy to define his character in the right tones. the flavor of his poetry is present in inspired manner. Salvador Dali... an interesting drawing who could be important role for Patterson . but something missing and Garcia Lorca remains the hero. a sketch - film. important for the science to suggest the atmosphere. for the art of photography. for the courage to resurrect in decent manner, an old story. for the status of start point for discover the universe of great artists. for the emotion who remains powerful a time after the end of the film.

Oh, wow, I just shudder to think of the multiple directions they could've gone with this, how rich and manifold the ways to do such a project. A film about Dali, Garcia Lorca, and Bunuel in one swoop. And I'm saying this as not a huge fan of these people. Rich in what we know and can imagine about a sort of popular life that we have shared into from our position as audience of one or the other, in the opportunities to annotate a multitudinous artistic life across so many different canvases, and to leverage all that as cinema about the dawn and twilight of the first truly modern era. The first time in history that we could really picture ourselves and, using ourselves, bring to life complex inner worlds.So we have Garcia Lorca: but no fiery duende that rises from the soles of the feet and stirs the heart into song like he wrote about. Beauty when it comes by, is rather plain and ordinary and treated with the faux-lushness of a period film. The man himself is the textbook version of spurned lover and idealist.We have Dali, him above all: but only ersatz madness and caprice, a hedonistic adonis caricature wholly attacked from the outside and using a fodder of replaceable mannerisms, with the mustache curved a little upwards as we know from pictures, and many rants about genius and breaking limits. But nothing about actually breaking them and none of the sublime intuition that melts time and is the revenge of abstract interior space upon the solid forms of history.And Bunuel, a little beside the other two: godless, fierce, radical, tormented, but a mere stubborn footnote in the exchange of visual platitudes about love and art - as exemplified by how vibrant feels among the rest of the film the short clip from Un Chien, of course the eponymous scene.So it's really sad that we have to settle for this, by itself a tame and harmless bout of youthful exuberance, a sort of safe exuberance that is nowhere as complex and impulsive as these people surely lived if we judge by their work, but really the most dismaying in context of these people and that work. The film could have been issued as part of any one of these peoples' vision and shaped accordingly: a poem on evanescent beauty, an absinthe dream, a vicious social statement, ideally conflating all three as their shared adventure across tumultuous worlds. The whole could transform as words and colors were added.So just a lot of ordinary panache is doubly insulting in this case. The pen-strokes all pontificate banalities. This is everything these people worked against all their lives, so to be so stereotypically embalmed in it?

All in all, I liked the story, the relationship is quite believable. I liked the way it evolves through time, the way their love is depicted in the movie. All the same I would recommend it just to watch while you are cooking or doing something else. I must say that the guy that plays Lorca is amazing, I'd never seen him before but i think he was great, he takes the movie for himself. As we say here,in buenos aires, "se come la pelicula" (in the good sense, mind you). On the contrary, though I like this pantinson guy, besides his looks, hes still not up to a Dali...far from him. He'd better continue playing parts as sexy vampire who walks the catwalk. Something was missing in his attempt to play the eccentric and genius Dali. Probably had they chosen another Dali, it would have been more effective. Great scenery, being Figueres in Girona,could not have been otherwise.