Little Ashes (2008) Reviews

• The critics are WRONG!

  Actor3172009-05-09

  Don't always believe what the critics say. I have no explanation as to why some critics gave Little Ashes bad reviews other than it just wasn't your typical movie and they couldn't understand that. This movie tells a beautiful and fascinating story (read the synopsis beforehand it helps). The acting is excellent. The accents sound/are authentic (when Dali sounds American or French that is done intentionally from what i hear.) oh, and it's an INDEPENDENT FILM! aka it's not necessarily going to be like every other dramatic film out there. Go into it with an OPEN MIND. If you enjoy the previews you will probably enjoy the movie. Go see it and form your own opinion. This movie is great but it isn't for everyone.

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• wow. i loved it. definitely a love or hate movie.

  jayjay_shine132009-07-21

  There aren't much words to describe. Whether you like this movie or not definitely depends on the type of person you are. its definitely a real independent European film. but i love it. i think the actors capture everything well and the casting was exceptional. i loved the relationship between Dali and Lorca. I watched it a few days ago and i am still thinking and obsessing about the film and its aspects. I think if your the more sentimental type you'll enjoy it, but then again you may not. Like i said, you will either love it or not. its not one of those 'society-accepted' common films i.e. 'transformers'. its artsie and dramatic and Dali is just eccentric. love it. love love love it. 9/10.

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• Haunting and captivating film with wonderful actors

  JaneYak2009-07-21

  I watched this film a week ago and after the last shot I realized that I wanted to watch it again. That very moment! From the very beginning! I read in someone's article the word "haunting" about this film - I absolutely agree with it. It's an elegantly made film with fascinating actors. The enchanting guitar, violin and piano just intensify the heady mood of it. The actors' way of speaking (described as "terrible accents" in someone's comment) didn't bother me at all, maybe because neither English nor Spanish are my first languages. But I agree with Dromerito2003 that it would've been more believable if all of them spoke Spanish (Robert Pattinson definitely has "language ear" and it wouldn't be difficult for him to speak Spanish only, I think). With subtitles. By the way now I'd like to learn Spanish to read Lorca's poems in it. And to visit Spain shown so lovingly ( I agree that photography is great!)and to see as many works of Dali as possible. And to watch "Little Ashes" again...

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• Little Ashes ... one of my favourite films of the year

  bethsaysgetrid2009-05-12

  I am writing this comment to declare my love for the film Little Ashes. I watched it for the first time last night, expecting it to be a rambling journey through the themes of art and lust. However i was pleasantly surprised to enjoy an excellent film. Personally i enjoy any historically based film but this is pure genius. The exciting tantalising life of Dali is explored perfectly in this film. The confusion and repressed love felt for Frederico struck a cord in my mind and i longed for them to couple together. Any film that inspires emotion in the viewer deserves the best comments any person could make. Everything about it made me smile. The delightful humour delivered with precision by the very talented and humble Robert Pattinson made me laugh out loud. The tragic ending to Frederico Garcia Lorca made me cry and the pure anger and frustration felt by Louis made me wish for their to be a happy ending. After watching this film i unbenowst to myself spend five minutes contemplating of the struggle that must have been felt by Salvador Dali at the time. The costume for the film also inspired me a lot. I aim in life to design and make costume for TV and film and this film spurred me on more. I wanted to be in the film whilst watching it, dancing in the bars and strolling along the beach, creating life from my very steps. The accents have been criticised heavily but i believe if it were not for this you would not understand the depth of emotion felt by the actors. A director is there to make every actor pronounce each word with precision and some have chastised these actors for doing this. It was the directors wish and it made the film more real. A technique i found extremely successful was the use of over head dialect from the letter reading between Salvador and Frederico, the English translation of the poetry express the frustration in the poems themselves and therefore adds to the realism of the film. One thing that frustrated me was the comments by American teens yearning to see this film simply for Robert Pattinson being in it. I myself am a British teen and this was part of the reason for me watching it i admit, but the story line enticed me more. I believe any role played by Robert Pattinson is there to be praised and his own reflection of character portrayed in the film make it ever more believable. Overall i believe this film is a beautiful piece revealing the frustration and depth of emotion normally hidden by people. Commendations to the director and actors for their brilliant portrayals. 10 out of 10, i loved it.

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• Too discreet, too charming and too bourgeois

  Ali_John_Catterall2009-11-11

  According to Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, the gay poet and dramatist, had been "madly in love" with him, but the affair was never consummated. Whatever the truth of the matter (Dalí would say just about anything to get a reaction - or for money), Little Ashes screenwriter Philippa Goslett has taken this, and the pair's supposed innuendo-laced correspondence, as the starting block for a torrid melodrama about forbidden love and artistic integrity, sketching in the details until the facts become as pliant as one of Dalí's timepieces. The year is 1922, the city is Madrid, and three creative geniuses just happen to be lodging together in student digs while unleashing a firestorm of modernity upon the world. The first act of the film has fun presenting a portrait of the artists as young dogs. Or in Federico's case, an Andalusian one; he later claimed surrealist wind-up Un Chien Andalou was a personal attack on him by his former chums. Here's bolshie Buñuel (Matthew McNulty), upbraiding Lorca (Javier Beltrán) for not being more of a modernist. And here's a "strategically placed copy of Freud" on somebody's desk. So which one's Dalí? Oh, there he is, a pale, effete lad, more stick insect than Catalan, pulling up to the doors of the Residencia in lace sleeves, knee-high boots and a poncy page-boy haircut. You can always spot those first-year art students a mile off, can't you? If Lorca's the wound, Buñuel's the scab. And Dalí (Robert Pattinson) is trying so hard to be edgy and out there he loses sight of the fact he naturally is. The three consolidate their friendships, and as is often the way with trios, Buñuel pin-balls between Lorca and Dalí, who have initially become far closer. How close? Well, let's just hope the homophobic Buñuel doesn't find out about it. Caramba! Too late. Although Little Ashes concerns artists and the artistic impulse, it's not what you'd call an 'art movie', sharing more DNA with, say, Lust For Life than 1991's Van Gogh. At its best, it does a good job of showing how it feels to navigate that tricky passage between late adolescence and early-twenties. But as a would-be penetrating expose, it's too polite, too compromised and stagy. Perhaps owing to its modest £1.4m budget, it looks - and sounds (everyone ees speekeeng like thees) like a teleplay, featuring stilted dialogue and heavy-handed symbolism, such as a scene of a heartbroken Lorca transposed with that of a slain bull in the ring. In the reductive way of biopics, Lorca's a sap, Dalí's a brat, and Buñuel's a yob. Beltrán elegantly conveys the poet's raw sensitivity ("like an animal that's been skinned" as Dalí puts it), though can't quite pull off his celebrated magnetism; the film would rather he fulfill his role as passive victim. Love interest Robert Pattinson is perhaps not yet old enough to play the bug-eyed dandy with the upside-down mustache, an exemplar of John Updike's aphorism that "Fame is a mask that eats into the face". Yet his grasp of Dalí-esquire tics and gestures suggest natural comic ability. He's wasted on those fantasy movies; he should play Buster Keaton. For his part, Matthew McNulty is saddled with the sketchiest, and for dramatic reasons, least sympathetic role as the bullish homophobe. Anyone wishing to get a fuller picture of his Residencia days should be directed to his autobiography 'My Last Breath', in which he says of Lorca, "Of all the human beings I've ever known, Federico was the finest." For the sake of argument, let us suppose an affair did occur, outside of Dalí's febrile imagination. However, by getting bogged down in a tease of a romance, the drama sidesteps the prevailing politics - vital to a real appreciation of the artists' anti-establishment stance, and all but cruises past the Spanish Civil War. Lorca's arrest and murder by fascist firing squad is predictably soft-pedaled, with the camera discretely pulling away from the forensics of his notorious dispatch. Ultimately, Little Ashes, a piece of commercial entertainment made on the other side of the twentieth century, lacks the courage of its case studies' convictions. This is most clearly illustrated by how far it's prepared to go in one direction, but not the other. In the movie's most hysterical scene, a self-loathing Lorca beds the unhappy Margarita (Marina Gatell) as a substitute Dalí, while the distraught painter voyeuristically watches. Whether the incident has any basis in reality or not, it's integral to the dramatic arc, and extremely graphic - nudging hardcore. Yet to portray this, in such prurient detail, but not its homosexual flip side - the poet attempting and failing to consummate a relationship with the painter (whether it happened or not), seems cowardly, and indicative of that bourgeois morality the film's subjects were doing their damndest to smash through.

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