Klimt (2006)

Unbelievable, those who actually say great things about this movie are the same pretentious people who look at a blank canvas and say "ah this is great art", and sip wine and eat cheese. This movie is a bad dream in a bad dream in a bad dream that never gives anything you can actually learn about the artist or the art scene during the time. Random punches in the street; mad people around the artist; about those women that don't understand art but are pretentious to say "Ah he is an artist".I really like Klimt's art work and his vision through his paintings. But the people behind this movie tried too much to dwell into how he might have thought and lost their way while making this movie, and as i am writing this while watching or skipping though the movie, there again the guy shows up who says he is from Paris, and represents someone, come to think off I don't even know his name.I never write reviews only when the movie is so bad that i have to write it to get it off my mind.. hehehehehehe

Sometimes I think that the most outlandishly "artistic" directors like Raoul Ruiz are the luckiest of all. True, their films are often slammed by the mainstream critics and rarely make a lot of money, but no matter what they do they will be praised in certain quarters -- so long as they remain obtuse and vague at the same time.I knew nothing about this artist Klimt going in to the film, and I know nothing going out of it. Even fact checking here on IMDb I find that much of the information they did present was invented, so basically the film has no informational value about the artist. This isn't a huge problem in and of itself for me because I don't watch a movie to find out facts. But without the facts, it's impossible for anybody in the audience to know what the heck the movie is supposed to be saying.The film it reminded me of was Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut", and I'm curious that one of the titles listed here on IMDb includes mention of Schnitzler. Apparently that's to clue us in to the idea that it's a dream, but Ruiz is no Kubrick and "Eyes Wide Shut" was decidedly tepid Kubrick anyway. The dream device could be a way to use film in an impressionistic way, but in this film there's nothing to get an impression of because the film is totally unhinged. There are tons of just awful sequences that are supposed to be shocking, like when Klimt's mother and sister start raving, but they look completely ridiculous.The worst thing about the movie is the script, which is full of ridiculously obtuse dialog about allegory and portraiture, doubles, etc. I think the audience is just supposed to sit there and think, "ok, there are some complex ideas here, so this must be a good movie." But as bad as the script is, the director could have saved it if he wasn't just spending the whole movie trying to imitate Kubrick, Lynch, and Greenaway. And one man who appears in every single scene in the film, the star Malkovich, could certainly have done something to save it but reveals his poor instincts instead. Malkovich does absolutely nothing except mumble and shuffle around in the movie, playing the character as so detached from life that his sexual exploits seem contrived even though they're the focus of the film far more than his artistic impulses. Even if you had a great script, Malkovich would have sunk the film with his monotone performance. As for the actresses who play his lovers, the less said definitely the better.It's one of those movies that 2% of the people who see it will run around for the rest of their lives saying that they were the only ones smart enough to "get" it. But everybody got it. It was a crap movie with awful performances and no real purpose. Like the artist's "double" in the movie, the film is a fake -- it holds forth promises to tell us about art but in the end it comes off as cheap exploitation, a modern pass-de-Metzger. Eminently miss-able.

I decided to rent this movie because there was a label on its cover - "WINNER. Moscow International Film Festival. Best Film" (distributed by KOCH Lorber Films, KLF-DV-3151). Technically it's not a lie - it's just misleading. The "Klimt" movie was a winner in a much smaller competition - "Russian Film Clubs Federation Award for Foreign Films" (there are a lot more prizes at this festival - Golden St.George, Silver St.George and so on). No more awards for this movie, and it reflects its light caliber.I didn't like this movie, and I have to say I admire Klimt paintings. I don't think that Klimt was so stiff and also sleepy. There is much more life in one simple photograph from the artist Wiki page, than in this whole movie. All these endless camera rotations around subjects! And too much too loud music... And actually an absence of scenario...They tried to sell this movie to public - nudes, decadent atmosphere, this misleading label. The ratings show that they failed... I give it 5 for some visual enjoyment I had... and some women hats there were really-really amazing!

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.