1001 movies to see before you die. This movie was unique. Telling the story of an amazing musician and his life in a very creatively composed way. Excellent acting, direction and soundtrack make up a good Canadian biopic. At times it was a bit slow, but it made me focus on the music all the more and appreciate it for what it was worth. The animated segment was bizarrely hypnotic, with simple circles moving during a piece, I enjoyed its Pink Floydish feel to it. Some of the details were lacking, but that made it the viewer make the jump to fill in the blanks, and this wasn't entirely unsuccessful. Perhaps a better introduction to the subject at the beginning could have made it more effective. Regardless, it was entertaining and unforgettable. It was on youtube.

To paraphrase the golden boy himself: The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in this biopic than in those about any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of conceptual identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile.

This is as good a biographical film as is possible, I think. Using Gould's recordings as the soundtrack, and his eccentricities as the subject matter, these 32 brief and desultory films sum up the Canadian character of the great pianist.

An interesting approach to the documentary format. It's also an interesting approach to the feature-length film.

Easily one of the top two or three greatest Canadian films. A portrait of an astonishing artist - quite possibly the finest pianist of the 20th century. Girard's approach was brilliant - to use 32 separate segments to create a mosaic that encapsulates this complex artist. It's also referencing Gould's most famous recording, the 32 Goldberg Variations by Bach. The film may be too esoteric for some audience's tastes but I'm sure Gould would have it no other way. This was a clear influence on Todd Haynes' equally unconventional biopic of Bob Dylan's I'm Not There.

u have to really like classical music and the piano to like this. I had never herd of glenn gould before this. Its an interesting way to do a biopic, half doc have drama.

A unique way to pay tribute to one of the most underappreciated performers in history. The 32 short films I'm sure contributed to the inspiration for many of the other great thematic short film collections that have come since.

An Interesting Experiment Produces a Boring Film In [i]Silence of the Lambs[/i], when Hannibal Lecter is allowed to have music, he requests [i]The Goldberg Variations[/i], as recorded by Glenn Gould. I'm not sure I have much familiarity with Gould's recordings, myself; I am a classically trained musician, and I love classical music, but Bach and the piano are not my favourite. I tend to prefer orchestral. Maybe solo cello. Mozart or Copland for preference, too. Though better Bach than Wagner. But it is intended to show something of Lecter's refined nature that it is Gould playing Bach that he requests. To a musician, it triggers even more specifics. Bach is very precise, the music I always think of when people tell me that being a musician means I ought to be good at math. I like Bach well enough, but it's the music I know where the math is most apparent. And there is the important fact that Gould was a bit eccentric himself, though nowhere near as eccentric as Lecter, of course! There is not really a plot to this. Vaguely and in theory, this is the life story of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (Colm Feore). One of Gould's eccentricities was a decision to walk away from a career as a concert pianist and stick to just recording. One of the short films is about that final concert; he signs a program for a stagehand (David Hughes) declaring firmly that it is his last concert. The movie is a collection of vignettes about the man, or at least an outline of the man. It talks about his childhood (Devon Anderson, Joshua Greenblatt, and Sean Ryan all play young Glenn), how he could read music before he could read words. There is a lengthy bit (by this movie's standards) about some stock or another. Feore provides us with a voiceover about the pills Gould was apparently taking. There is a sequence in a truck stop where Gould is just listening to the people around him talk. And so forth. The problem with the vignette format is that, by definition, you cannot get much information across. The film is only about an hour and a half long, which is why I'm watching it--I have somewhere to be in about half an hour. However, that means that the vignettes must average about three minutes long. One is forty-five seconds, which at least means that there is room for one to be longer, but none of them are more than about five minutes. It's also true that many of them are not so much stories as collections of images. I literally have no idea what the truck stop thing or the stock market thing have to do with Glenn Gould, and I am only assuming that Gould was on all those pills, because I don't know much about Gould the man. And this film is not going out of its way to help you learn. On the one hand, there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, if we focused more on the music, I would care more. And there are a couple of scientific errors in the explanation about how Gould's music went up with Voyagers I and II. None of this was helped by the technical problems Netflix was having providing the stream. This shows that there are lots of little things about watching a movie which the average person never notices but which have a huge impact on your viewing experience. For one thing, the aspect ratio on this movie was off. It was fullscreen--because the actual picture itself had been stretched. I thought it made Colm Feore look a bit like a Grey from certain angles, though Gwen suggested it made him look like a vulture. What's more, though I don't know the technical reason for it, the picture was almost stuttering, as if not every frame had been provided. Netflix is making it obvious that they're hoping we'll all stop asking for actual DVDs, but if this is the kind of streaming experience we're occasionally going to have, I'll pass. And that's even leaving aside that I couldn't hear some of the dialogue but subtitles were unavailable, because subtitles are unavailable for streaming content. Of course, I only half watched the movie because I was interested in the movie anyway. And I probably don't have to tell most people why I watched it. Yes, Roger Ebert gave it four stars, and I'm at least starting every movie Roger Ebert has given four stars to that isn't something I know I don't want to see. (I don't care how many stars he gives Woody Allen movies!) But that isn't it, either; that isn't, honestly, enough to make me finish watching a movie. What is? Well, like most people of my generation, my brain is full of [i]The Simpsons[/i]. And one of the best [i]Simpsons[/i] episodes ever made, proving that the vignette method can work if enough of the individual vignettes are interesting, is the season seven classic "22 Short Films About Springfield." It's the one which features things happening to people who aren't just the Simpsons, though it's also the one where Lisa gets gum in her hair. No one story in it was enough to carry an episode, but [i]that[/i] is how you make a bunch of bits of nothing into something great!

Absolutely superb, mind expanding film. Lots of fun, if you like Bach or Gould.

Brilliant, but not very entertaining

Quick, see it before it stops streaming on Netflix. Fascinating look at Glenn Gould taking the form of 32 short films instead of a traditional biopic format. Well worth watching.

i do quite like the concept of "film portraits" and i think this film had the potential to be very innovative. however, i think this film, despite a few interesting tidbits, was on the whole poorly executed, monochromatic, and disappointingly canadian. the "vignettes" were all focused on a very narrow subject matter, without really having a thematic center - they tried to follow gould's life in a somewhat chronological fashion, which i think was the least creative choice, given the possibility and potential of the vignette medium. i would have much preferred to see various scenes/moments from the different aspects of gould's life, or more interactions of him with other people. the film as it stood was a collection of interviews, either fictional, or documentary-based, and some experimental footage set to gould's music. there was much untapped and unexplored in this film. it also soon became painfully clear that the film was trying to avoid showing gould play the piano because the actor wouldn't be able to play at the required level. overall, very bland and distinctly canadian. i don't understand how or why, but i always find canadian films evoke a sense of listlessness, as if lacking life force, or purpose, and this film was no exception.

An unconventional and beautifully crafted film portrait of one of the world's greatest musicians, dramatization-ally chronicling his eccentricities, interviews, interpretations, and work. For any music historian, piano player, or musician in general, I HIGHLY recommend this film. Don't let the title deceive you; it's only 93 minutes long. Watch it instantly on Netflix.

Brilliant, idiosyncratic look at a brilliant, idiosyncratic pianist. Gould would have been proud.

I think I have attention deficit disorder, this was great because I could stop between shorts and pee a lot. Occasionally the movie does feel a little indulgent in it's quirkiness, I don't care to watch a guy stand there and move his hands around for 3 minutes while the camera pans around him, but seriously, if there's a scene you don't like, wait 2 minutes and it will be on to the next one. Convenient! So, points to this movie for its unusual structure, even if, in the end, the picture of Gould himself is not a lot clearer to me than it was at the start.

This is exactly what it says it is... but there's more structure than meets the eye. If you have absolutely no interest in the subject matter, there won't be much here for you, but I became interested in seeing this partly after getting a copy of Gould's two performances of "The Goldberg Variations" and partly because I liked the director's "The Red Violin". The 32 short films run the gamut: tiny talking head interviews, dramatizations of events in Gould's life, fanciful dramatizations of letters he'd written, tours inside the soundboard of a piano, and abstract animations. Yet the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is a cubist view of Gould - looking at him from many different perspectives to give you a sense of the man, his exceptional musical vision, and his eccentricities without cobbling together a forced narrative.

Why was this not imitated? One of the truly great films of the 90s, one of the only truly great biographical films, and one of the only films to give Colm Feore his due as a potential lead. And the music, oh the music. Sorry if you don't get it, try it again at some point in a few years to see whether you feel the same way.

Mmm, variety, vignettes, morsels to strap the interest down with a subject unnecessary to strap, Glenn Gould: the eccentric Canadian with a passionate ear for sound. Did it begin through the walls of your mother's willing exposure as a seed? Predestination has never felt so romantic until now. A nimble, inexplicable phenomenon.

I really liked this because, like Citizen Kane, it shows how a man is many things and none of the things that people or he even thinks. In this case, the form WAS the content, and it truly taught you much and nothing at the same time. Superb!

The movie is constructed of 32 short films that fit together on a preverbal way. There really is no time line and all of the segments are shot in stunningly different styles. The movie and his music are very complimentary. His music falls into the catch-all modern Jazz bucket. Like his music, the movie meanders around; has high points and are pleasantly amusing. I caught this movie on cable several years ago and viewed it several times after. Don't look for an arc or a point just enjoy it.