When did jasper johns die
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
film score can artistically make or break a movie, especially one -- like "The Red Violin" -- that aspires to a loftier-than-average cultural tone.
Whenever the music swells in this extravagant time-traveling costume drama tracing the year life of a priceless hand-crafted violin, "The Red Violin" begins to assume the intense emotional colors of John Corigliano's ravishing score.
Kasper weiss biography of barack It turns out that Morritz is of the same mind. Are you sure you want to remove null from My List? The intricate history of a beautiful antique violin is traced from its creation in Cremona, Italy, in , where a legendary violin maker Carlo Cecchi paints it with the blood of his dead wife Irene Grazioli to keep her memory alive, to an auction house in modern-day Montreal, where it draws the eye of an expert appraiser Samuel L. And after he specifically made sure the coat-checker wouldn't let him forget it.As Joshua Bell's solo violin pirouettes above the churning orchestrations, played by the London Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen, the actors' expressions begin to seem profound, and an atmosphere of romantic exaltation co-opts the blunt, flat-footed dialogue.
But then the music subsides, and the movie clatters back down to earth.
Lions Gate Films | |
| Instrument of power: Jean-Luc Bideau, left, and Christoph Koncz in Francois Girard's film "The Red Violin." |
The story, which jumps around in time and place, belongs to the Thousand-and-One-Nights genre of fanciful yarn-spinning.
Each episode is a gaudy historical tableau illustrating a particular society's relationship to European classical music.
Kasper weiss biography of barack obama That man is Nicholas Ollsberg, the representative from the Pope Foundation as revealed by the scenes in Oxford. Their commitment to historical realism meant the film would involve different languages: Italian, German, English, Chinese, and French. Now removed from the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Government makes arrangements for a Montreal auction house to sell these items. New to PBS?Over the course of three centuries, the violin makes its way from 17th-century Italy (Cremona) to 18th-century Austria (Vienna) to a tribe of mountain-dwelling gypsies, to 19th-century England (Oxford) to Communist China (Shanghai) and finally to contemporary Canada (Montreal).
To give the story a final fillip of suspense, Charles Morritz (Samuel L.
Jackson, badly miscast), a rude, unscrupulous New York-based violin restorer, plays a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with the Montreal auction house that has hired him to restore the instrument. He has discovered that it is the legendary "red violin," made in by the fictional Nicolo Bussotti (Carlo Cecchi).
The yarn begins at an auction in present-day Montreal where we watch the sale of a Stradivarius violin for nearly $2 million. Next up on the block is the newly restored red violin, which arrived at the auction house in a shipment of goods from China.
As the bidding gets under way, the movie flashes back to late 17th-century Italy where we see the instrument being "born" in the workshop of Bussotti, a bullying master craftsman. We also meet his extremely pregnant wife, Anna (Irene Grazioli), and Cesca (Anita Laurenzi), the eagle-eyed old servant who, on the eve of Anna's giving birth, insists on reading her employer's tarot cards.
The story is structured around Cesca's turning up of the cards one by one. Her enigmatic interpretation of each card predicts an episode not in the life of Anna or the son she hopes to bear but of the special, perfect violin Bussotti has made.
Biography of barack obama Archived from the original on March 4, The Los Angeles Times. When the results of the varnish tests arrive, Morritz is shocked to learn that the violin's varnish contains human blood. Those who own it tend to love it passionately, and be inspired by it like nothing else.The movie revels in cliches. One of the violin's first owners, Kaspar Weiss (Christoph Koncz), is an angelic prodigy who cuddles it in bed like a teddy bear and faints dead away (literally) during an audition.
The movie's giddiest set piece observes the silly romantic posturings of England's greatest violinist, Frederick Pope (Jason Flemyng), who suggests a flouncing hybrid of Liszt, Paganini and Byron, and his George Sand-like lover, Victoria (Greta Scacchi).
One scene, in which Victoria awkwardly slavers over Frederick's half-clothed body while he plays, is unintentionally farcical.
Scenes set in Shanghai during Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution, in which Western cultural artifacts are tossed into a bonfire, also come off as cartoonish distillations of history.
And when the movie isn't dishing out this sort of instant history, it spends too much energy bending the narrative to create teasing little plot twists that aren't worth the effort.
"The Red Violin" wants to make a grand statement about the mystical power (both celestial and demonic) of great music. But give or take some scattered musical moments, the frame in which that message is couched is too kitschy to let that vision catch fire.
PRODUCTION NOTES:
'THE RED VIOLIN'
Directed by Francois Girard; written, largely in English with some subtitling, by Don McKellar and Girard; director of photography, Alain Dostie; edited by Gaetan Huot; music composed by John Corigliano, with the London Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and solo violin performed by Joshua Bell; production designer, Francois Seguin; produced by Niv Fichman; released by Lions Gate Films.
RUNNING TIME: minutes.
Kasper weiss biography of barack trump National Review. Over the course of the film, we gradually come to learn the connections that lead many of the attendees to seek the violin, and how many lives the instrument has affected for good or ill. Surprisingly, the most difficult part of the shoot, according to Director Gerard, were the scenes taking place in the Montreal Auction House, where the complexity of the action put a strain on actors and crew alike. Archived from the original on September 10, RATING: This film is not rated.
CAST:
In Cremona: Carlo Cecchi (Nicolo Bussotti), Irene Grazioli (Anna Bussotti) and Anita Laurenzi (Cesca).
In Vienna: Jean-Luc Bideau (George Poussin), Christoph Koncz (Kaspar Weiss), Clothilde Mollet (Antoinette Poussin), Rainer Egger (Brother Christophe) and Wolfgang Boeck (Brother Michael).
In Oxford: Jason Flemyng (Frederick Pope), Greta Scacchi (Victoria), Eva Marie Bryer (Sara ) and David Gant (Conductor).
In Shanghai: Sylvia Chang (Xiang Pei), Liu Zi Feng (Chou Yuan), Tao Hong (Comrade Chan Gong) and Han Xio Fei (Young Ming).
In Montreal: Samuel L. Jackson (Charles Morritz), Colm Feore (Auctioneer), Monique Mercure (Madame Leroux), Don McKellar (Evan Williams) and Paula De Vasconcelos (Suzanne).