Change Your Image
rob2661
Reviews
Modigliani (2004)
Who Knew Art and Debauchery Could Be So Annoyingly Dull?
Elsa Zylberstein gives a very irritating, mannered performance. Every time that she screams or yells (and she does that quite often in this movie)you wonder if she understands English well enough to understand what she's saying. She also changes accents several times throughout the course of the movie.
Garcia's accent lapses from Italian to Brooklyn, (which is odd considering he's from LA). Plus he's gotten old and fat.
As a biography, it doesn't really stick to the facts, especially with regard to Modigliani's death.
As a romance, it's a love story between a drug addict/alcoholic and his punching bag/doormat/unfit mother/ model. Hardly Romeo and Juliet.
As a tragedy, generally a movie about a tragic couple shouldn't make you think, "phew! Thank god those two aren't around breathing the same air as me anymore!" As a period piece, its set in Paris in the 1920's and filmed in Rumania with an anachronistic soundtrack.
As a movie about artists, aside from one nice sequence where Picasso and Modigliani converse with Renoir at his estate, it seems to be this movie's contention that painters spend most of their time drinking absinthe, mistreating their wives or mistresses, acting like pompous egomaniacs and occasionally firing or pointing guns at one another.
Pretty much a botched job from start to finish. Writer, director, and cast should all hang their heads in shame.
Ignore any positive comments you see here. Don't waste your time or money on this nonsense.
Maniac Nurses (1990)
Flashes of Genius
The first sign that there is a genius at work in the making of this motion picture is the long (some might say far too long, but I'll not hear of it) sequence where the narrator explains why the Maniac Nurses, even though they came from white trash origins, were even worse than everyday run of the mill white trash because they had lost their enthusiasm for life's pleasures. This narration plays over footage of the nurses shooting up and half-heartedly watching another nurse performing a rather lethargic striptease for their benefit. Although I can't prove it conclusively, I believe the footage of the striptease is looped and just plays the same sequence of moves over and over again. The looped footage and the over the top pseudo-sociological narration are perhaps the greatest synthesis of sound and image ever perfected in the art of film-making.
Also there is the baby born with an Elvis tattoo. Its not a birthmark, its a tattoo. And he didn't have it tattooed onto his skin, he was born with it. Once you get past your initial resistance you can see the genius inherent in this plot point.
And if I remember right the first baby born with an Elvis tattoo died inexplicably, but then another one was born with an Elvis tattoo as well. Fortunately the second baby born with an Elvis tattoo managed to live long enough to have some impact on the movie's plot.
Even if I did the best acid in the world for three weeks straight, I never would come up with this stuff in a million years.
Other than those flashes of genius, this is a real stink-bomb. Not even a good T&A exploitation or gruesome violence exploitation flick. Just some cheap footage shot by neophytes that Troma studios bought for a song and then probably threw a few hours and a few hundred bucks into adding narration too. (Just a guess on my part, this is not the kind of film to inspire exhaustive research.)