Rida Al Barazi's Personal Blog » Movies

Modigliani - The Movie

Rida — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 14:19:53 +0000

After watching Modigliani for the third time, I couldn’t stop myself from writing a quick review and recommend it for all.

In the early 20th century, there in Paris, a forbidden love, between the Italian artist Modigliani and the mother of his child Jean Hébuterne, Jean’s father denied her marriage from the Jew bohemian artist, as Modigliani had no money to support his own child or even himself, but he used to hang around with his Montparnasse friends like Rivera, Soutine and Kisling challenging the whole world with their way of life, a special challenge were between Modigliani and Picasso, a bohemian and an aristocrat.

If you don’t know Modigliani, this movie will give you a brief about him, about the lovely bohemian atmosphere of Paris in the early 20th century, a lot of passion and feelings, love and hate, rage and challenge, with the main three roles of Modigliani (by Andy Garcia), his love Jean Hébuterne and Picasso, not to mention the Montparnasse friends like Kisling, Soutine and Rivera, all getting prepared for Paris’ annual art competition, that both Picasso and Modigliani had a special opinion about.

This film deserve watching for the good acting, directing and story, but not to depend on for facts or overview about that era, there is much more to be told, but at the end I really enjoyed the movie and I believe you will enjoy it too.

twofifty.org

Rida — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 21:09:10 +0000

A year from now I was following the IMDB Top 250 movies voted by IMDB users, trying to watch all what’s in this list, today I added this to my 43Things and thanks for the posts their.. I found about twofifty.org a simple webapp, simply dedicated for this list.. :) it’s cool to find such a very small basic application, to organize something a lot of people are trying to do..

I immediately signed up, and fortunately I got my invitation quickly, and here we go.. I got a my 250 list which I hope I can watch it all soon :)

The Art of Violin

Rida — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 08:22:21 +0000

Finally I got the chance to watch The Art of Violin, a great documentary which gives a wonderful overview of the greatest 20th century violinists, in their individual uniqueness and talented performances, it’s the only documentary I’ve heard about that gives such a wonderful historical information about the legends of the devil’s instrument.

Directed by a Paris-based concert violinist Bruno Monsaingeon, with the great contributions of Itzhak Perlman, Ivry Gitlis, Hilary Hahn and Ida Haendel sharing their experience and opinions about the greats, telling personal stories and analytics about them too.

The Art of Violin gave me the opportunity to see Fritz Kreisler, Misha Elman, Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh, Joseph Szigeti, Zino Francescatti, Nathan Milstein, Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern performing in clearance and perfection, isolated from all around them, trying in every note to do more perfection to their performance, each one did it in his own way, none of them were the same, each had his own style, but all of them shared the love to the devil’s instrument, and always worked hard on Paganini’s works.

I really enjoyed the contributions all over the movie, I learned more, and got to know these performers much better, some of them were completely new to me even, and the rest I was hoping to see them playing, and here I did.
I recommend this movie for every classical music lover, for every violin player (if he didn’t already watch it). Go watch it and enjoy.