Posted on 11/22/2018 8:24:38 AM PST by Cecily
A broken visionary endures a harsh, nearly penniless life, for a while, while making the world a richer place one unfashionable canvas at a time.
With a story like that, it’s no wonder any new film about Vincent van Gogh tends to put moviegoers in a defensive crouch. Yet an improbable number of filmmakers of very different temperaments have successfully envisioned the Dutch Post-Impressionist’s acts of tormented creation on screen.
Julian Schnabel provides the latest and one of the best with “At Eternity’s Gate,” a fierce, immediate and often inspired response to van Gogh’s life and work.
(Excerpt) Read more at ajc.com ...
I’ll have to imdb William Friedkin. Thx
He could pull of the good guy (Platoon), bad guy (Wild At Heart), or good-AND-bad guy (Spiderman).
Friedkin did The Exorcist. That was the scariest movie I ever saw. Just thinking about that movie today gives me the chills and nightmares.
Turned it off halfway through. I couldn't take it.
On 20 June 1986 Jeanne Calment became the oldest living person in France at the age of 111 when Eugenie Roux died.[12] Her international fame escalated in 1988, when the centenary of Vincent van Gogh's visit to Arles provided an occasion to meet reporters. She said at the time that she had met Van Gogh 100 years before, in 1888, as a thirteen-year-old girl in her uncle's shop,[1][13] where he bought some canvas, later describing him as "ugly" (laid), "blighted by alcohol" (brûlé par l'alcool), and visiting brothels (il fréquentait des maisons de tolérance).[3]
I would see it, if I ever got to go to a movie. It’s my favorite art museum in the world and the only one that doesn’t make me go crazy from too much stimulation to appreciate the art. The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. No frames, no glass, no artificial lighting. It’s perfect.
I was driving through downtown LA last night in the... what do you call those drops of fluid falling from the sky again... oh yeah, RAIN. You couldn’t film that movie today unless you hauled out all that homeless people junk along the roads. Haven’t seen anything like it since I was in Italy during a garbage union strike.
LA has the best of both worlds Homeless with their viruses and illegals with all the costs. Great place to be.
Dafoe has a crazy look to him, almost as wacky as Gary Busey.
Except he wasn’t in a car accident!!
There’s a GREAT movie called Boondock Saints, where he plays a genius, dress wearing detective lol
Usually it would repulse me, but Willem’s insane so there’s not much to read into it :)
He is GREAT in the role.
HE IS married and in the article I read he said he is completely straight.
Imagine, today it takes courage to say that in hollywood.
I’m tellin ya.
Please don’t forget the twin natural resources too, lack of water and lack of forest management.
I live in oceanside in north san diego county. Next door Carlsbad built a desal plant after 12 years of opposition. This added 10% to the county water supply. What did the rest of the state do under Brown’s leadership? Nothing, but declare a drought.
Thanks for the link. I see Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal tv series) is in it. Must be playing the priest at the asylum.
Are you daring to say that humans are more important than the delta smelt? Don’t you even CARE about this tiny useless fish at all??
I lived near the delta SMELLED IS the correct word
Would those little fish be taste all fried in the pan like they do those little smelt in Italy?
Also smelt roe sushi is delicious. I think we need to conquer these bleeping smelt.
And can the train sh*t and build dams for snow runoff and more desalination plants...
I don’t have a clue WTH a smelt is. LOL
including Sorcerer. A remake of the 1953 French “Wages of Fear”.
Van Gogh never picked up a painter’s brush until he was 27, by which time he already had failed as an art dealer and a missionary and was desperate for something to do to give his life meaning. The reason he painted in such bright colors was to try to similarly brighten the viewer’s mood. Other than some few lessons in the final months of his life, he was completely untrained as an artist.
Some have speculated that he was particularly fond of yellow because of his persistent intake of digitalis, when then was used as a treatment for epilepsy. High concentrations of digitalis’ active ingredient, digoxin, can cause xanthopsia, a condition that causes everything to be seen as tinged with yellow and points of light to be seen surrounded by colored halos.
Van Gogh was known as truculent from his childhood, and his tendency to argumentativeness was the principle reason he could not keep a paying job. He was so generally disagreeable that the people in the town of Alres wrote a petition claiming he was a danger to the community. Which prompted Vincent to have himself admitted to the asylum where he would have his most productive period.
No one knows the full accounting of either of the most famous events of Van Gogh’s life, the ear cutting and his death. Some think he cut off his ear in an epileptic seizure. Some think it was the outcome of a straight razor fight with Paul Gaugan (or that the fight itself was the result of a seizure). The most recent theory is that he and Gaugan were duelling with swords and Gaugan lopped it off. Regardless, the fact that he somehow thought the best thing to do with the severed ear was to give it to a prostitute makes it clear he was not in a fit state of mind.
His death was ruled a suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound but no one knows how he came by a gun or where it went to. A rusty revolver was since found in a field where Vincent might have been painting that day but far too long after for any connection to be proved. And some local boys were known to have delighted in tormenting Vincent. One of them had a cowboy costume he’d bought after attending one of the European tours of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. To round out the outfit he also bought a small caliber revolver that was known to be prone to misfiring. And the doctor who attended Vincent on his death bed made no mention of either gunpowder residue on his hands or “tattooing” on his belly, both of which should have been evident if he had shot himself, especially since it was a black powder revolver. So the competing theory is that Van Gogh and the mean boys had a run-in, he somehow was shot by one of them and Vincent — who fellow artists often said was prone to self-martyrdom — chose to make his final act one of mercy. So he claimed he had shot himself (although said with varying degrees of certainty) to spare the real culprits.
Van Gogh’s career as an artist lasted only 10 years yet he managed to paint almost 900 works (one painting on average every 36 hours). He also wrote some 800 letters, most to bother Theo.
Despite his own brother being a highly successful art dealer, only one (some say two) of his paintings had been sold before the time of his death. For years they still were considered worthless so some fell to ruin and his own mother threw out crates full of them when he died. His work might have languished in obscurity forever except for brother Theo’s widow, Johanna, who made it her mission to promote Vincent’s art and his legacy.
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