Klimt (2006)

So much average

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

A Disappointing Continuation

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It's amazing how this poorly done movie still got published.Whoever was in charge for making this film didn't take a moment and think that the film was terrible. Was this film a school project for a drama class? Gustav Klimt was progressive. The movie was regressive.When I looked at the credits, Raoul Ruiz was mentioned. He died in 2011, so whatever anyone says about him is not fair. He is dead and cannot defend himself.When I looked again at the credits, various countries were listed that are responsible for this film. Austria was one of them. Any film that was done with Austria's help takes us back to the 19th Century with respect to movie-making techniques and technology.People in Austria---please stay away from producing any movies. They are just awful.

Being John Malkovich was one of, if not the, strangest movies I have ever seen. Klimt is similarly strange, but not quite that strange. Like Russell Crowe's John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, Klimt hallucinates people, and in a similar way, you, in the audience are just as confused about who is real and who is imaginary. You are only gradually let in on understanding this.The movie is decorated with dozens of naked women who mainly parade about, or who try to seduce Klimt. Given that he is not particularly handsome, charming or intelligent, I failed to see the attraction. Perhaps it was just his fame as a painter.The interiors and costumes are opulent turn of the century Vienna. Elaborate Viennese pastries tempt the eye. The sets are the main appeal of the movie.There is a lot of cat and mouse dialogue where the characters reveal nothing and say nothing while attempting to sound profound. It is all quite frustrating.Nikolai Kinski plays the homosexual painter Egon Schiele in an exaggeratedly swish way, reminiscent of Da'an's hand gestures in Earth Final Conflict.The costumes and hair treatments are so elaborate, that I could not for the life of me tell the female characters apart. Is this a new character or an old one in a new do? The characters all behave the same way and look similar. I didn't develop any bond with any of the characters because I could not even tell them apart.

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.

extraordinary filmshocked, initially, at the comments i found herecame to this film by serendipityknow nothing about Ruiz' other work -- now i want to see it allbeautiful beautiful beautiful -- writing and design and photography and musicshocked by its beauty and shocked by its reception -- tho i see there are only 34 comments here -- not primetime -- a gaggle of geese -- with sincere apologies to geese everywhere...rent it-- buy it -- a real piece of work