The trailer is absolutely horrendous because of the unnecessary voice over and the really bad taglines/slogans that appear on screen. I’ve been reading decently positive reviews of the film itself on other sites, so I’m hoping this is just a case of this being a terribly put together trailer.

The three films are all very different. Little Ashes explores Dali’s focuses solely on his failed relationship with Lorca, and ends following Lorca’s assassination in 1936.

Dali and I: The Surreal Story starring Al Pacino is based on a book written by an art dealer who was convicted of selling fake Dalí’s shortly after Dalí’s death in 1989. It depicts Dalí’s outrageously decadent final decades, and shows him as a bitter, abusive, depraved, perverse hoaxster. There are 769 official “authentic Dali signatures” recognized by the art establishment, only one of which actually came from his hand. A very large percentage (we’ll probably never know exactly how large, but certainly over half) of Dali paintings, drawings and prints produced post-1940 were the work of hired commercial artists. By the mid-sixties, Dali spent several hours every morning signing thousands of blank sheets of paper. He used his considerable down-time to organize extravagant weekly “sex circuses,” featuring dwarves, hunchbacks, live lobsters, fascist dictator themed dildos, and several A-list celebrity hangers-on, like Mia Farrow, Andy Warhol, and David Bowie, as well as any other social-climbers he could round-up. He would direct these orgies as a voyeur, and would take every opportunity to humiliate and degrade all participants.

The Banderas movie I understand is a mixed CGI/live action musical comedy focused on his artwork and his relationship with his business manager/wife Gala.

There’s also a Peter O’Toole film called “Goodbye, Dali,” based on the memoirs of some tv character actor who was in Dali’s sycophantic inner circle during the sixties and seventies. I expect more of the same as the Pacino picture from this one.

As an artist doing a great deal of research on Lorca, Dali, and several other associated lights at the moment for a project of my own, it seems the only one of the four worth my time is Little Ashes, in that it attempts to show the man behind the deliberately constructed public persona we’ve all become familiar with, and explores the tragedy that caused Dali to don that mask, which he’d wear 24/7 for over five decades, in the first place. He only took it off on his deathbed, when he confessed that he had always believed Lorca was his soulmate, but that he was simply “too scared” to continue, knowing a relationship with the increasingly out Lorca could well derail his fledgling career and quite possibly lead to his early death, as was the case with Lorca.

As to the trailer, I think the film itself looks amazingly lush, considering the miniscule budget ($1.4 mil), and from all indications is carefully researched, well-written (the screenplay won a major European award even prior to production), and well-done. I do agree, however, that the voice-over is horrendous, particularly since he get’s Lorca’s first name wrong (it’s Federico, not Frederico!) I suspect they spent all their money making the film and have not much left for staging a well-done promotion.

I think that the movie will be great. I mean at least Javier Beltrán and Robert Pattinson have the courage to play in a movie as gay guys when they’re straight men.