My Look at Frida at Film for The Soul

My rather odd look at Frida can now be read at Film for the Soul for those interested. I wrestled around with this piece for awhile and I am still not sure what I think of it, but I was thrilled to be asked to submit it and join in on the amazing decade series that is running over there. I suspect the main reason I had difficulty writing this is despite my distaste for director Julie Taymor, I really adore Frida. So, roll on over and check out my tribute to a really special performance by Salma Hayek and drop a comment and let Film for The Soul know how terrific their site and series is.

"I always thought the only alien in this high school was me": Robert Rodriguez's The Faculty (1998)

Even his most ardent detractors probably wouldn’t deny that Robert Rodriguez has had one of the most interesting and unpredictable careers in modern American film. From seventies inspired action films like Desperado and Machete, to his spastic children’s productions like Spy Kids, Rodriguez has been a hard guy to pin down. Perhaps the most inspiring thing about Rodriguez has been this fiercely independent streak, and the fact that this is an artist who has done exactly what he has wanted to do since day-one and his best works, like Sin City, have shown him as one of our most valuable mavericks.


Of all of Robert Rodriguez’s films, perhaps none have been as unfairly overlooked as his terrific 1998 Sci-fi/Horror film The Faculty, an endearing and extremely entertaining work inspired by Phillip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter’s The Thing. I rewatched The Faculty for the first time in probably a decade and I was really struck by how well the film has aged and I think it stands as one of Rodriguez’s best works.



Something strange is happening at Herrington High School. After a shy new girl arrives in town many of the school’s faculty members start acting odd and it is up to six kids, with nothing in common except they know something is wrong, to figure out exactly what is happening to their school.








Armed with a killer cast including Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Jordana Brewster and Clea DuVall as the inquisitive students and Robert Patrick, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie, Salma Hayek and Jon Stewart as the whacked out teachers, The Faculty is one of the best acted horror films of the late nineties and one of the most entertaining. While the many Scream inspired films of the period haven’t aged well at all, The Faculty still feels as fresh and as invigorating as it did over twelve years ago. Here’s a modern Science Fiction Thriller that balances the campy fun of the fifties with the hard-edged bloodletting of the seventies in a way that few films of the nineties managed.





Working from a script from the pen of Scream writer Kevin Williamson, Rodriguez shot the Faculty in and around Austin, Texas after the release of his first audacious collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, From Dusk Till Dawn. The shoot was fairly quick and according to most accounts a pleasant, if hectic, one. Financed by the Miramax arm that Scream helped build, Dimension, The Faculty must have seemed huge compared to low-budget works like Bedhead and El Mariachi that Rodriguez had been shooting just a few years earlier but it was still a fairly modestly budgeted film at under fifteen million.






The biggest complaint often thrown at Rodriguez is that he is a filmmaker who takes his homages to his favorite films and directors too far. A common complaint against The Faculty was that it was essentially a mash-up between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Breakfast Club (for the record it includes a number of other visual winks to works as far-ranging as De Palma's Carrie and Scott's Alien). Like in Scream though, the characters in The Faculty are well aware of how similar their situations are to these works and they frequently comment on that fact. Is Rodriguez deliberately paying tribute to a number of iconic science fiction, horror and teens flicks with The Faculty? Sure, but that doesn’t mean that The Faculty isn’t a wonderfully captivating and entertaining film in its own right, with more genuine humor and scares than most of the many thrillers that populated theaters throughout the late nineties.




While Rodriguez lends his typically energetic and fluid directorial skills to The Faculty this is, like many of his best works, a showcase for his actors and they all deliver great performances. Like he would in Sofia Coppola’s mesmerizing The Virgin Suicides a couple of years later, incredibly handsome Josh Hartnett makes a wonderfully captivating ‘bad-boy’ and Elijah Wood is excellent as the unsure nerdy kid whose intellect helps the students figure out what is infecting their school. Lovely Jordana Brewster excels as the school’s pretty girl with depth, but best of all is Clea DuVall (one of my personal favorites) who is simply perfect as the lonely ‘goth’ girl who turns out to be one of the strongest kids in the school. For the title characters of the film Rodriguez assembled a wonderfully diverse collection of actors with Robert Patrick, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie and Bebe Neuwirth particularly standing out. Rodriguez favorite Salma Hayek has a relatively small-role as the school’s nurse (I would have been ‘sick’ everyday) and Jon Stewart has a couple of really funny moments as a science teacher who is involved in one of the film’s best kills.







One of the best features of The Faculty is its terrific soundtrack made up of Marco Beltrami’s eerie score and a number of modern takes of songs from the likes of Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper and The Who. Class of 99’s haunting take of Floyd’s classic from The Wall, ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2), is used particularly well here and gives the film a fittingly heavier feel than it otherwise would have had.







If The Faculty has one drawback it is the unfortunate decision to add some extremely poor CGI effects to the special creature effects of Gregory Nicotero. The obvious computer effects, so common and typically poor in this period of American filmmaking, take away from the film’s power and one can only imagine how visceral it would have felt without them.







Problems with parts of the visual look of the film aside, The Faculty is a sharply scripted, well-directed and wonderfully acted work that is well worth another look for any who haven't seen it since it first came out. Like all of Robert Rodriguez’s films, The Faculty received mixed-reviews but it was a small hit upon its release during the Christmas season of 1998, eventually grossing almost three times its budget. Rodriguez would step away from his adult works for a couple of years following the release of The Faculty in favor his children’s franchise (Spy Kids) but he would thankfully return to the R-Rated world in which he is most suited with 2003’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico. He wouldn’t deliver another horror film until his Grindhouse contribution Planet Terror. The Faculty remains the only one of his films to not be given special edition treatment on DVD or Blu-ray. I hope this is rectified one day.

"I Paint My Own Reality": Julie Taymor's Frida (2002)

***I wrote this look at Frida a few years back for the excellent and much-missed blog Film for the Soul. I have recently dusted it-off a bit and am now presenting it here.***

Few theatrical experiences have left me more incensed than the one I experienced in the winter of 2000 for Julie Taymor’s Titus. I still remember stumbling out of the Lexington, Ky. Theater, where I saw it with my equally pissed off friend David, into the winter night and thinking that a bitter cold fresh air had never felt quite so good.

It wasn’t that I disliked Taymor’s first film, it was more like I despised it. It’s a bit hard for me to articulate what it was about Titus that angered me so much, but I felt like my resentment towards the film was palatable that cold winter evening, as I made my way sleepily back to my home in Frankfort, Ky. Part of it was my love for Shakespeare’s original play, and my thought that if there was one of his works that needed a solid adaptation then Titus Andronicus was the one. Another aspect that was swelling the seething anger I was feeling was the near universal acclaim the film was receiving from both critics and the public. Had I seen another work entirely? Perhaps an ill conceived and particularly rough cut had made its way to certain theaters and I had been unlucky enough to catch it. I knew of course this wasn’t the case; a fact that made my feeling of disenchantment with the world around me even stronger. Finally though, what made me really angry was the fact that it was obvious Julie Taymor was extremely talented, and despite my hatred of what she did to Shakespeare’s most savage play, I had to admit that.

Flash back to a few years before to my first experience seeing Salma Hayek on the big screen. I had missed all of Salma’s early work including her first films with Robert Rodriguez, all of which I would catch up with later, so the first time I got a good look at her came in 1996 while watching the thrilling Rodriguez directed Tarantino scripted From Dusk Till Dawn. Despite the fact Salma only appears for what amounts to just a few minutes of screen time, she became a major film star in those few moments. Like some sort of God made cross between the doomed Soledad Miranda and Ave Gardner in her prime, Salma Hayek was undeniably special, but throughout the nineties her looks eclipsed her talent as she was all but wasted in one film after another. By the turn of the decade it looked as though Hayek would disappear into the long line of great could have beens…another actress buried by her looks despite the obvious talents she possessed.

I mention my first experiences with both Julie Taymor and Salma Hayek because I believe their one film together, 2002’s exquisite Frida, to be an absolute collaboration…a rare cinematic work where the person in front of the camera has as much claim to authorship as the person behind it. I would go so far as to argue that the true auteur behind Frida is Salma Hayek and not Julie Taymor, which isn’t to diminish Taymor’s direction and vision of the film. Instead I mean it as a tribute to Hayek, who was the one who worked her ass off for much of the late nineties and early part of this decade to get Frida off the page and into the theaters in the first place.

Few modern artists lives seem more fitting for a big screen movie than Frida Kahlo. After all, the Mexican born Kahlo really LIVED a life. Besides being one of the most astonishing talents of the twentieth century her circle of friends, lovers and collaborators included everyone from Diego Rivera to Josephine Baker to Leon Trotsky. Add her accomplishments and partners on to what was truly a difficult existence filled with enough pain and heartache to cover a dozen lives, and the story of Frida Kahlo is one that seemed to demand telling…so why did it take so long to get made?

The attempt to get Frida Kahol’s life to the big screen would itself make an interesting and compulsively entertaining movie. Everyone from Madonna to Meryl Streep were rumored to take her story on in front of the camera, with filmmakers ranging from Robert De Niro to Brian Gibson being attached at one point behind. The film almost got made in the late nineties with talented and sorely undervalued Laura San Giacomo in the title role, but that fell through like all of the other aborted projects had, and by the beginning of the decade it appeared the long awaited Frida Kahlo film would become one of Hollywood’s ultimate back burner projects…until a much determined Salma Hayek stepped in.

Hayek’s work on the film is quite astounding. She acquired the rights to Kahlo’s extraordinary paintings, as she knew that without them the film would fail, and she helped assemble the film’s supporting players, a key to getting the film the financing that finally came from Miramax in the early part of the decade. Big names like Edward Norton, Antonio Banderas, and Ashley Judd signed on for much less their usual fees because of their belief in the fiery Hayek In fact the entire production of Frida can be viewed as a tribute to not only Frida Kahlo but as well to Salma Hayek, an actress refusing to slip into oblivion before she played the role she felt was destined for her.



While it is just Julie Taymor’s second film as a director, the maturity and growth between it and her first film Titus is quite startling. Whereas Titus felt like a visual exercise without a sense of control or reason, Frida is a colorful intelligently designed feature that shows Taymor learning to reign in her particularly distinctive visions in order to satisfy, and not overwhelm, the production she is directing. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Frida, outside of Salma Hayek’s magically moving performance, is the fact that it finally plays out less as a film about the life of Frida Kahlo, and more like a part of one of her life’s works.

The pleasures of Frida are as easy to pinpoint as its faults. It’s a spectacularly beautiful film featuring some of the most distinctive and colorful photography of the decade courtesy of Oscar nominated Rodrigo Prieto. Prieto’s work here is just beyond belief and seeing the film on the big screen was so incredibly vivid that I don’t even know how to go about putting it into words. Another high point of the film is in the moving score by Oscar winner Elliot Goldenthal, which gives a musical life to Kahlo’s most unforgettable and stunning paintings. Oscar nominee Julie Weiss’ beautiful and imaginative costume designs also supply the film with many of its most eye popping moments, causing the picture from beginning to end to function as its own very specific piece of living art.

Despite the work of the incredibly talented cast in front of the camera, with special kudos going to Alfred Molina and Mia Maestro, the unnerving and bewitching Hayek totally controls the film. In one of the great performances of the decade Hayek delivers a brilliant, brave and blistering performance as the trailblazing Kahlo, and she never makes a wrong move from the unforgettable opening close-up of her face, to the final shot where she literally burns into one of the Frida’s paintings. Hayek is overwhelming in the film, and she probably deserved the Oscar in 2003 over the equally stunning Nicole Kidman, who won for her spectacular work in The Hours.

Frida isn’t perfect though and too often it feels like it is just scratching the surface of Frida Kahlo’s life. The biggest mistake the film (and probably mostly Miramax) makes is attempting to squeeze Kahlo’s life down to just two hours. If any film this decade was deserving of a truly epic length then it was Frida, and the work suffers because of the brevity of its running time. Also, while Taymor’s direction is much improved over Titus, there is still the feeling she hasn’t fully come into her own as a filmmaker yet. For all of the bravura set pieces and undeniably artistic brilliance Taymor shows, certain sequences just don’t feel resonate enough and, more often than not, the power behind Frida is in Hayek’s performance, and Kahlo’s art itself, and not in Taymor’s direction. Still, the film is an impressive achievement for Taymor, and she remains an interesting talent to watch.

Despite its faults, I find Frida to be one of the most resonate and beautiful works of the decade. Whether or not Salma Hayek ever gets another part quite suited to her considerable talents remains to be seen, but Frida is an invigorating and intoxicating tribute to her and I am thankful she got the film made. While the film divided critics back in 2002 when it came out, and it continues to do so, I feel that perhaps the biggest question to be asked in regards to its success is does a watching Frida serve as an invitation to explore more of Kahlo’s life and works? I honestly can’t imagine anyone saying no, a fact that alone make Frida a resounding and quite a moving success.