Pretty Good

hyped garbage

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

As a moviegoer with not much expertise on classical music, or interest in film without a coherent narrative, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould is a bit of a challenge. Certainly I was aware of Gould's reputation; this film also incorporates animation by Norman McLaren, another Canadian legend. A curious hybrid of fictionalized biography and documentary, the film is indeed slightly fractured, but not as much as the comically inept Leonard Maltin whined about. Its pieces come together to tell more of running story than you'd think. It's true someone thirsting for more action and events may come away disappointed, but there is drama and humour here. Above all, what links the story together is the passionate and energetic piano playing of Glenn Gould himself, enough to inspire even a person without much of an ear for classic music.

"32 Short Films About Glenn Gould" gets my vote for the year's Best Movie, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Director, and as my friend David said, "Best thing since sliced bread." Glenn Gould was a Canadian concert pianist. When he was thirty-two he announced he would no longer perform live concerts. Instead he would record and broadcast only, as he saw the performance hall as an elitist and obsolete means of presenting music. He was the first noted classical performer to abandon formal performance attire, something radical at the time, opting for a business suit rather the traditional black tie and tails. But his ideas extended beyond performance sites and attire to the very nature of art, challenging the hierarchical distinction between "artist" and "audience." He wanted creative listening as well as creative performing. And like many geniuses he was full of peculiarities and paradoxes.He would usually grant interviews only over the phone, and as Yehudi Menuhin said, created his own life and led it to the exclusion of the rest of the world, doing nothing but applying himself to his physical and intellectual work. He was a perfectionist in his recording and his music, yet would hum as he played and record with little regard for things like a squeaky chair or pianos with noisy works. He was a man who cherished solitude, but would talk for hours on the phone and is remembered as a kind and compassionate man. He disdained violence and competition. As a child he serenaded cows in a pasture; upon his death he left half his estate to the SPCA, the other half to the Salvation Army.One of the many things this movie does well is to integrate actors portraying people, incidents and possibilities with real people speaking their own thoughts. A piano tuner, a chambermaid, an agent, cousin Jessie Norman and others talk about Glenn Gould. In one segment we see the depiction of the final moments before his last concert. Immediately following, Yehudi Menuhin speaks insightfully about Gould's reasoning behind discontinuing public concerts and elaborates on Gould's mindset. Menuhin's appearance makes the previous dramatization seem as real as cinema verité.A Sociologist recalled being interviewed on the Canadian radio system by Glenn Gould. "It was a very penetrating interview, the most intelligent questions I think I've heard about the North, from experts, laymen, or anything else ... questions that required rather long answers and as I would start to speak or make a point, he would register his feelings not by voice, but by a smile ... All the time he was using his hands and conducting. And this was perhaps slightly off-putting when you're trying to think deep thoughts, because I had no idea what this was all about. He was continuously waving his hands, sort of as if to bring up this idea or so on ... I was his orchestra for that hour." And throughout the "32 Films", we see that conducting the sound in his world is no affectation, but an indication of how deeply attentive Gould's perceptions and musical sensibilities run.In "Truck Stop" we witness Glenn Gould listening in on ambient conversations at the diner, subtly and almost surreptitiously moving a forefinger in concert with a conversation as it swells, subsides and blends with the other conversations and sounds throughout the highway restaurant. Such is just one example of the film's subtle yet magnificently effective structure, linking several of the "short films," in this case by displaying Glenn Gould's compulsion to conduct sound, whether while listening to an interviewee, a Beethoven sonata, or to the conversations at a truck stop.Glenn Gould seemed to focus on sound as intently as a Zen monk would attend to his breath during meditating. As a child he listened voraciously to the radio. As an adult he played the radio even while he slept; in fact he could not sleep without the radio turned on. He was always listening. We know that sound conveyed extra meaning to Glenn Gould. After watching this movie it seems to me that he heard so much, he was compelled to organize it into music at least in part because he could not ignore it. He seemed to hear no sound in isolation. I have to believe he could hear no silence.One of Gould's driving passions was solitude. He considered it to be a necessary element in the human equation and an important condition for nurturing the creative process. He linked the idea of solitude with the far North and explored it in an innovative radio format, a sound documentary, called, "The Idea of North." In the movie, the short film "The Idea of North" immediately follows "Truck Stop," showing us some of the inspirational link to the radio production. As in "Truck Stop," we first hear a single voice talking, which is then joined by other voices that mingle and intertwine as musically as a string quintet of voices.This movie may not change your life, but it made me more elated and optimistic about the world than any movie I can remember. It woke up some of my curiosities and gave me a renewed shot of vitality. It made me think about how a person can use his capabilities and ingenuity to a creative purpose and how much better we all are for it. It reminded me that solitude need not be dark and lonely but can be fodder for the joy of creative imagination; that we need not have the artistic genius of a Glenn Gould to justify our efforts, nor a Bach cantata every Sunday morning to hear music. We have our own eyes and ears to use and our own curiosity to explore. Many drops make an ocean, and as Shakespeare said, "Sweet are the uses of adversity."

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.

This week we watch a non-linear film tilted Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. This film took thirty-two vignettes that concern some aspect of Glenn Gould's life. Vignette is that in theatre and script writing, these are short, impressionistic, scenes that focus on one moment or gives one impression about a character, an idea or a setting. Each of these thirty-two shorts are glimpses into the life of Gould, they are like puzzle pieces that we, because of the non-linear aspects, are forced to piece together the life of Gould. It was 32 shorts that were all different from each other, which helped to bring out the theme. It is possibly named after a musical piece that Gould did an interpretation on, Bach's Goldberg Variations. Because these vignettes are broken up into various sections it was more interested than if it were linear. The shorts demand out attention in order to make connections between the disassociation of these clips. In order for us to understand the irrational we must use the irrational thought to explain it.I think that this was done beautifully in Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. We are drawn in to the film by the various clips and the beautiful music that we hear. The beat of the video draws us to want to learn about this man who in this documentary tells his own story. This man seems to interview himself. He holds his interviews by telephone. While he is on a phone conversation he talks through out the night to himself while the person on the other side of the line has fallen asleep. On a play of what was going on, he would introduce his own thoughts by asking himself a question, and then he acted out the answer. This helped us to understand who he was and helped us look at him subjectively.This man was a genius, in his musical abilities many were awed. It could be said that isolation can breed genius but genius can breed isolation. Is it possible that this is what happened to Gould? Who knows what could have been going on in his mind? An outward appearance that we get of him is his clothes. He would wear layers of clothes even in the summer time to prevent from catching a cold. There is a short where we see all the various pills Gould was taking trying to balance each other out shown in various shapes, sizes, and color.The music that we hear is what connected Gould to the rest of the world but at the same time it kept him separated from it. Technology was able to help Gould perfect his music. There is a clip where Gould is in a recording studio and we are listening to a play back of a recording he just made. He says that after listening to it that it is almost good. The recording seems to takes the soul out of music. He decides that he wants to re-record the track, so he prepares to play, but we don't see him play. The show is about a piano player but we never saw him playing the piano. It is possible that he hated the instrument that he is most known for. You would think that since this is a documentary about a piano player that you would get to see him play, but you don't. Is this out of respect for him, he is so into his music that it was about him and not his music. It could also be that the film is not about him but about who he was. A genius mind is very complex and often difficult or hard to understand. I think the film does well to try and portray the randomness of a genius mind in the style of non-linear film where we are forced to use our own minds to make the connections in the life of Glenn Gould.