Product Description

Nominated for six 2002 Academy Awards(R), including Salma Hayek for Best Actress, FRIDA is the triumphant motion picture about an exceptional woman who lived an unforgettable life! A product of humble beginnings, Frida Kahlo (Hayek) earns fame as a talented artist with a unique vision. And from her enduring relationship with her mentor and husband, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina -- CHOCOLAT), to her scandalous affairs, Frida's uncompromising personality would inspire her greatest creations! Also starring Antonio Banderas (SPY KIDS), Ashley Judd (KISS THE GIRLS), Edward Norton (RED DRAGON), and Geoffrey Rush (QUILLS).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1266 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-06-10
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 123 minutes

Amazon.com
Salma Hayek makes up for many bad movies with her fierce performance in this sumptuous film. Hayek plays the Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, whose tempestuous life with her unfaithful husband, muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), drives the story of Frida. Maverick director Julie Taymor (Titus, the Broadway stage production of The Lion King) pulls out a wealth of gorgeous visuals to capture everything from the horrific bus accident that damaged Kahlo's spine to her and Rivera's trip to New York City, where Rivera's political leanings ruptured a commission from the Rockefeller family. Though the script spends too much time telling us how great Frida's painting is (rather than trusting in the power of the images themselves), Taymor's dynamic energy and Kahlo's forceful personality give Frida genuine emotional impact. The superb cast includes Roger Rees, Valeria Golino, Ashley Judd, Geoffrey Rush, Antonio Banderas, and Edward Norton. --Bret Fetzer

DVD features
The first disc starts with a 38-minute interview with Salma Hayek that, with her recollections of the film, works the same as a commentary track. Director Julie Taymor takes center stage for the rest of the 2-disc set. Besides an engaging commentary track, there are two interviews with the director, a Q&A session after an AFI screening, and a better one with Bill Moyers. The second disc is set-up for short (5- to 7-minute) featurettes on the making of the film--production design, cinematography, locations, two visual effects pieces, and so on--but oddly not one with the Oscar-winning make-up crew. All of these segments are better produced and more interesting than most DVD supplements, however there is little biographical information on Frida (letting the movie speak for itself). The music element gets the most attention: an interview with vocalist and Frida's lover Chavela Vargas, Hayek interviewing composer Elliot Goldenthal, and Goldenthal's own commentary track explaining his Oscar-winning score. --Doug Thomas

From The New Yorker
At the center of Julie Taymor's vibrant bio-pic is the relationship (always described as "tempestuous") between the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) and the talented painter Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek). After an hour or so of this Punch-and-Judy show, with its noisy drinking, hurling of kitchen items, partings, and reconciliations, you may want to knock both lovers flat with an enormous chili pepper. Yet "Frida" is much better than it has any right to be. The movie has a rambunctious spirit and a liberated sense of color-an appreciation of the raw, strong Mexican folk tradition that gave both artists their special juice. Taymor and a gaggle of screenwriters are much too shrewd to accept the sentimental feminist view that Frida was Diego Rivera's victim. Smart, willful, and perverse, this Frida is nobody's servant, and the tiny Hayek plays her with head held high. With Ashley Judd, Edward Norton, Antonio Banderas, and Geoffrey Rush as Leon Trotsky (one of Frida's many lovers). Cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

"Frida" hits all the bases
This film is outstanding in so many ways: First, the musical score is a tremendously exciting! Second, the sets, the photography and use of color are artistic achievements on thir own. Third, the integration and melding of Kahlo's art work into a film is brilliant. Fourth, the acting, especially by Selma Hyak. is excellent and she really channels Frida. My only reservation about the film is that it should have been done in Spanish, with sub-titles
which would have been no problem for Selma.

Great Movie
I adore this movie! It's a very interesting look in Frida's life. I really enjoyed the way her artwork was integrated into the movie. Salma Hayek was a perfect choice for the role - a strong and talented woman must be played by an equally strong and talented woman. I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in her life or Mexican art in general.

An Exotic Flower
I recently read an article in the New York Review of Books (May 15, 2008) analyzing the work of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo that reminded me how much I liked this film, especially the performance by Ms. Hayek (who received an Oscar nomination for her efforts and who bore a striking resemblance to Frida in the film). The gist of the article, which included some biographical detail that is also explored here (her various severe mental and physical problems, his stormy relationship with her fellow artist and husband the world famous muralist Diego Rivera, her bisexuality), is that while much of Kahlo's artistic work reflected her strong psychic attachment to Mexico it also placed her squarely in the camp of naturalist painters.

I am not enough of an art devotee to make comment on that above mentioned critique, however, from the several paintings of Kahlo's that I have seen I would argue a little more toward the surrealist school that virtually every Mexican artist in the 1920's and 1930's drew from as they created their work. But enough of that argument for now. This film, in its own round about way, by presenting the various psychic pains (failure to have the children she desperately wanted, her topsy- turvy relationship with Rivera as she tries to make her own space in the art world and the underlying tensions of combining politics and artistic endeavor) gives a fairly decent gloss, for a commercial film, on the trials and tribulations of being a Mexican woman artist in the early part of the 20th century.

Of course, for this political junkie and admirer of Leon Trotsky the names Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera conjure up political connections as much as art. One of the strands working its way through the film is this couple's relationship with the exiled Trotsky when President Cardenas granted him a visa in 1937. All sources that I have read and photographs that I have seen have mentioned that Trotsky was smitten with Frida's exotic beauty (to the furor of his companion, Natalia). However, it was rather startling to watch the episode where Trotsky jumps into bed with Ms. Kahlo. I have noted elsewhere that the old time revolutionaries, especially the Russians, were extremely reticent about discussing personal sexual matters in their memoirs and autobiographies. Trotsky was no exception. Is that scene merely cinematic license or was Trotsky really just a dirty old man? You decide. I will concentrate of his political wisdom. And Frida's strangely exotic paintings.