Saturday, September 4, 2010

Worst of the Worst: #53, Modigliani

Biopics are generally pretty boring because there can only be but so much really interesting drama in someone's life. Modigliani, to worsen the blow, is a biopic about the last days of an Italian artist who died in 1920. Not really my cup of tea. The film follows the artist's final days in Paris as he is about to die from tuberculosis worsened by drugs and alcohol. I learned lots of great stuff from the movie. He had a heated rivalry with Picasso (he didn't actually), the two artists entered into a great competition to see who was the best artist in Paris (there was actually no such competition), in said competition Picasso entered a portrait of Modigliani (he never actually painted one), Modigliani won the competition but was not there because he was being beaten by robbers and that led to his death (again, no actual competition and he actually died solely from the disease and was not beaten by robbers). So a truly factual and interesting biopic, albeit with direction that fed off of needless melodrama and looked like I might have shot it on my Nikon Coolpix. At least, with the movie taking place in 1920, all of the techno music during the montage scenes made sense. To be honest, I could barely pay attention to the movie because it was so boring. If they were going to make so much crap up, couldn't they at least have had him fight Godzilla or something?

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