Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It is notoriously difficult to make a compelling film about the life of an artist. Directors usually resort to depicting those troubled geniuses, such as Van Gogh and Michelangelo, who had vivid and turbulent lives, even then the resulting film is often lamentable. Glenn Gould may have been a genius, and may have had more than his fair share of eccentricities but it requires something special to make a powerful and strange film about an over-intellectual pianist. Francois Girard's 'Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould' is certainly special, and often dazzling. Of course it will not appeal to those who like blockbuster type films, or to those who can't read without moving their lips, it requires an intelligent, informed and attentive audience (which pretty much rules out the vast majority of the cinema-going public) but not one that is especially interested in classical music. Anyone who is interested in the creative spirit in man or in experimental film-making will I think find this a wonderful film.Just fifteen years after its release the film now seems to have been completely forgotten. The fact that, at the time of writing, it is not yet available in Europe on a DVD seems a terrible indictment of the current state of the money-obsessed, Hollywood-driven film marketing industry. If you have a brain - and a soul – go search this little gem out.

I enjoyed this film considerably, however, I am also a die hard Glenn Gould fan. The film captures the genius and eccentricity of Gould with vignettes scored with Gould's interpretations of Bach and Beethoven weaved with glimpses of his autistic, or Asperger's, personality. Some of the negative or neutral critics listed here are not completely inappropriate. The film tends to cater to the classical music devotee as opposed to developing a narrative for the casually disinterested viewer. However, anyone with superficial knowledge of Gould, but with an interest in Bach or Beethoven, will enjoy this film, if anything, for it's choices in musical scores.

If Ludwig van Beethoven could create thirty-two piano sonatas, then Francois Girard can craft thirty-two short films--using as his subject, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould.Certainly the late pianist was extraordinarily gifted, of that there is no doubt. Unfortunately for the world of music, he emitted a somewhat negative vibration, which tended to diminish rather than enhance those great works his prodigious talent allowed him to execute.One of the most disappointing aspects of Gould's taste was his obvious love of Bach. True, the pianist could perform Bach's piano works with great technical flair; for this listener, though, the result only occasionly touched their core. Because only a few musicians can negotiate the challenging contrapuntal writing on a technical level, Gould was automatically a member of an exclusive club. Also, due to the gross elitism fostered by the European tradition, which was transported to both America and Canada in their formative years, a skewed consciousness was born and developed in the new land, which continues to this day.The great composers created works of great beauty based upon their own rich human experiences. In the case of Bach, it was between him and his God. Nowhere was there an idea of box seats and peanut galleries, of aristocrats and plebians or other hierarchical designations which tend to separate people. To be a great composer one has to be great human being; the same qualification applies to those musicians qualified to perform these works. Bach's inspiration was truly that; it came from within, the result of a deep spiritual knowingness. Gould's world is one of ego manifestations, quirks, eccentricities, frustrations and the like. Bach's master was truly expression, with technique being the servant. Gould, because of his spiritual limitation, could only achieve Bach's ultimate level intermittently. The end result of Gould's performance was, like this movie about him, a mixed bag. True, prodigies are rare and publicly lauded. There is much to appreciate on a technical level, yet music in its highest form is greater than that. It transcends the ego to reach the higher self with its awesome power. This value is merely glimpsed occasionally in the work of both Gould and Girard in this filmwork.

Spoilers hereinThe other half claim that the world is divided into two types of people. Depending on your vocabulary these are neurotics and psychotics; heads and hearts; numeralists and geometers; fatalists and cocreators and so on. Whatever terms you like to use, Gould is in the first of these, and that reflects his approach to music. Bach is also.Bach's music is highly mathematical, almost mechanically so. Stripped of emotion, it is pure in an abstract, cosmic sense. Gould's approach to music (and life -- not an incidental overlap) is neurotic, highly charged, anticipative, brilliantly logical, nimble. This mix -- together with a relatively more common virtuosity with the instrument -- makes Gould the best performer of Bach we have. His animation of the mathematics is always ahead of our own perception, so it makes the mathematics seem more alive. Not real life, but the kind of life we see in animated spheres.Contrast this with another world entirely, say Rubenstein (or Argerich!) and Chopin. This music is human, rooted not in some abstract aether, but in the soul. It is not clever, but real. It is not golden, but tearful, sweaty. It deals not with celestial mechanics, but with yearnings. Not with precision but with hesitations and local attractions. Not with planetary gravity but the emotional kind.Myself, I consider the latter to be true music, the life-altering kind. The former is brilliant decoration, also perhaps interesting technically. And that's the problem with this film: it emulates the Bach notion of little snapshot explorations. Each one is crafted to be technically brilliant; each one has some conceptual relationship with its neighbors. The sum triangulate the matter, giving a totality of external but abstract and distant probes.But the method lacks soul, and the subject here does too. We are intrigued by his eccentricities, but never invest in his being, because he doesn't have one in the musical sense. He has washed it away.For myself, I have to relegate this film to the huge stack of failed attempts to give us a film about music that has the same power, and type of power, as that music. It may be too hard an endeavor, but in this case the enterprise fails because the subject is in the wrong half of humanity.