...from Goya's Ghosts, people. If ever a movie jumped the shark, it was this one. Whenever an actor or actress appears twice in a movie as two different people, you should always be suspect.
Instead, go see some artwork by Goya or heck, read about him.
Wikipedia says:
Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. He has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns.
In the 1814 painting (above), The Third of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, Goya depicts a scene from the Spanish war of liberation when many innocent citizens were shot by Napoleon's troops the morning following a popular uprising in Madrid.
Patrick and I learned about this painting during a lecture we attended at the DIA. Wikipedia sums it up nicely:
Both the night and symmetrical composition of the subjects stress the drama: the faces of those about to be shot are filled with feeling, while the soldiers are shown from behind, their humanity erased and their being reduced to mere components in the implacable machinery of death. The positioning of the soldiers and the man with arms upraised is both a conscious reversal of the poses of the main characters in Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii and a reminder of the crucifixion of Christ.
The white of the victim's shirt represents the innocence and purity of the some 5,000 Spanish civilians who were executed between May 2 and May 3. The central hero's deeply suntanned appearance and clothing unmistakably indicates that he is an outdoors worker - an ordinary anonymous man at the centre of this great unfolding tragedy. He alone looks straight at the faceless enemy. Though on his knees he is a giant who towers above all at the very moment before his death.
Ahh, I feel like I've done a little work to wash off the distaste from that awful, awful movie.
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