Gerhard Richter - Painting (Sunday, March 18, 2012) (30)

It's possible that Gerhard Richter's color-field abstract painting are the best example of the physical work that goes into the creation of art, the formalism of a canvas. In her new documentary, Gerhard Richter - Painting, Corinna Belz, shoots the German post-modernist in his studios and in museums and galleries where he fights with the paint and the canvases to create his work.

As a process documentary, this is absolutely amazing. We see how Richter takes a blank white canvas and adds big swaths of color, seemingly at random, then takes Plexiglas trowels of different lengths to smudge the paint. He then covers over one layer with another, then scrapes again to reveal the hidden and random color fields beneath. Finally he applies paint directly to the edges of these massive knives and goes over the surfaces another time, removing and adding color at the same time.

It is never clear to us when he is done with a work or at what state he is in. At one point an assistant jokes that it's better to not comment on anything because he'll take a positive remark as a sign that the picture is bad and will start over from the begging, thus wasting everyone's time.

We get small glimpses of his mindset and his approach to his pictures, but he remains particularly sphinx-like about what he does and how he knows when pictures are done (I guess he has to keep some secrets).

There is a wonderful small moment as he looks at old family snapshots and comments that he has no memory of the scenes or the people in them (his parents) and can't actually account for the surrounding areas, beyond the borders of the image. It's such a wonderful overintelectualized and particularly East German view of the world. A fetishization of the banal and bleak. Still, it offers an interesting prism through which to see his work. He makes pictures that we can see, concentrating on composition and relationships of shapes and color. Any other content for him is noise and irrelevant.

The best moments in the film come when the canvases he works on fill up the entire screen and we see him moving across it scraping with his Plexi-ledge. Frustratingly, Belz includes moments of his representational pictures that seem to confuse the story and become noise for us. Still, this is an excellent example of some of the best moments in the recent trend in artistic process docs (there have been dozens, including recent ones on Louise Bourgeois and Richard Serra).

Stars: 3 of 4

Pina 3D (Friday, December 23, 2011) (125)

Pina is a wonderful dance documentary by Wim Wenders about the work of the modern dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. But it's much more of a documentary in the document element of the term - it's really a dance recital, or the presentation of several of Bausch's best-known and loved works, as there's not much biography in the picture. Wenders weaves these performances, presented by Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal and the dancers who knew and loved her (she died in 2009, just as filming was commencing), with brief testimonies by these dancers about their art and their love for Pina.

I had the opportunity to see this film in 3D and I have to say it was totally a wonderful experience. I normally find the 3D process to be disorienting and irrelevant to the movie watching process. Most films shown in 3D aren't really enhanced by the perspective. Some of the best 3D films play with a meta-concept of the format, so it's enjoyable to watch it in a "third dimension," partly because the director is making a point about the experience of watching or a joke about 3D films of yore (House of Wax, Dial M For Murder, etc.). Here, however, Wenders uses the 3D to really put you inside the dance performance. I know that sounds really annoying and cliché, but it's totally true. The way it's shot, with cameras onstage between the dancers, you lose track of the end of the stage, the proscenium and where/who is the audience.

To further enhance this submersive experience, Wenders shoots a good amount of the dance pieces on the Wupperthal Schwebebahn, a hanging tram line that runs through Wupperthal (OK - how did I never know this existed? It's amazing!). What results is the most visceral flying experience I've had since I saw To Fly! in IMAX at the Air and Space Museum in the early '80s. You're actually hanging over a city, over a river, and the sensation is breathtaking (regardless of the dancing).

I also happen to love the concept that the Schwebebahn was built in the early 20th century, as a crowning achievement of the Industrial Age, and that we're now experiencing it a century later, in 3D, an achievement of the digital age. I expect that's part of modern dance and performance, bridging generations and centuries. How lovely.

Stars: 3 of 4

Urbanized (Friday, December 23, 2011) (123)

Urbanized is the third part of director Gary Hustwit's design series (is it a proper series? I'm going to call it a series.). Helvetica was his brilliant examination of the modernist typeset, Objectified was a less wonderful survey of contemporary design of things we use on a daily basis and now this film is a look at the design of cities. He explores how towns end up looking like they do and how municipalities have tried innovations to make things more useful or more beautiful and how sometimes people respond negatively to these changes.

Hustwit makes beautiful looking films filled with wonderful photography, this time by Luke Geissbuhler, and interesting shots of things that we might take for granted (like the sun setting over a highway). There are some absolutely wonderful transitions from one chapter to another here, one element that is rarely used but really helps in documentaries.

There are a bunch of talking-head interviews with international "starchitects," including Rem Koolhaus, Norman Foster, Oscar Niemeyer and designer/critic Michael Sorkin. Overall this is a pretty, fun and interesting film. It's much better than Objectified, but not nearly as good as Helvetica.

Stars: 3 of 4

Eames: The Architect & The Painter (Tuesday, December 20, 2011) (119)

This is a nice little documentary about the lives and work of Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife team who captured the spirit of the post-war boom years with their elegant, efficient, modern and futuristic designs. (In case you didn't know, Ray was a lady.) It's an interesting story about how they fell in love due to their mutual respect for one another and their ability to work beautifully together. It shows their work not only designing the chairs and tables, but also their houses, paintings, films and other artistic projects. They had a studio where they worked with dozens of young designers over the years in a free-for-all of creative exploration.

The film also examines how Charles, the face of the company (because he was a man, of course), frequently took full credit for the work of his underlings and Ray. He comes off as a bit of a creative egomaniac who gave little explanation about his ultimate choices. Ray shrinks a bit into a corner of the screen here, partly because she was simply not in as many films of the time (because Charles was in all of them, by choice), but also because she gave into the dynamics of their relationship. This is a bit frustrating as it's really mostly a movie about Charles with a chapter on Ray, but told with a post-Second-Wave tone that suggests the couple were co-equal partners... which they might have been, but is hard to see with the materials presented on screen.

This is a fun movie and very informative. There are a handful of creative flourishes that directors Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey insert at times to tell the story in an Eamesian way, though nothing too revolutionary.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (Wednesday, August 10, 2011) (67)

Sophie Fiennes's documentary about German mixed-media artist Anselm Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, is an interesting and beautiful meditation on the creative process and a fascinating examination of how one artist sees the world and the future. The title is taken, apparently, from the biblical story where after humans leave the earth, there will be a new world of life, that there's a cylce to things and that we build things and they fall apart and then they're re-built later.



Kiefer's art is very much related to this. He's a post-structuralist painter and sculptor whose work generally is abstract but deals with the general driection of things moving toward their endings and toward chaos. Generally his work is about post-war, post-industrial, apocalyptic and post-apocalypic themes where stuff falls apart and breaks and the colors and textures are earthy, dirty and somber.



Fiennes filmed Kiefer during a time he was working at a former silk factory in the South of France. Apparently he took over a complex of buildings for several years, excavating certain areas, using the industrial spaces and materials as his inspiration. The work there is an expansion on the motifs and materials of lead, cement, dust, glass, water, books, boats (and all that those things symbolize). We see him working with his assistants on certain paintings (which are really assemblages of paint, found materials, glass and lead arranged in generally significant ways - though their significance is a bit hidden from us).



Fiennes alternates between expositive sequences of the work in the spaces of the building, undercscored by minimalist music by Ligeti and others, silent shots of the assistants and Kiefer working on the art in silence and more interactive parts where the artist explains to his assistants what he needs done by them. There are no talking heads or voiceovers explaining what we're seeing. There is, however, an interesting sequence in the middle where Kiefer is interviewed by a German journalist. He's very funny, in a very German way, in this element, possibly because the journalist is so literal and rigid — even more German than the artist.



This film is a very interesting examination of how art is about exploring human existance and how art refers to other, older art. There's an interesting dialectic between heavy, solid things and new, fluid things and how monumental elements fall apart over time. This is an investigation about how concrete can be soft and malleable and how dust and dirt can be pretty, about how all that remains after a silk factory leaves is concrete and metal. Soft and hard. Kiefer's work is not particularly aesthetically beatutiful, but it is powerful and full of complex emotions. This is an interesting look at a chapter of his career, moving from order to chaos.



Stars: 3 of 4

Cave of Forgotten Dreams- 3D (Friday, April 29, 2011) (26)

On its surface, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a documentary about the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in South-western France and the spectacular paintings/drawings on the walls. Herzog and and a small crew were granted rare access to the cave to shoot a movie... so he made a documentary in 3D, of course! He shows amazing shots of the drawings, speaks to scientists about the age of the cave and the drawings and what we know or can speculate about the people who might have created them.

Of course nothing as as simple as it seems with Herzog, a madman, genius and life-long rule-breaker. This film really is an examination of human perception, comprehension and existence as well as a post-modern evaluation of the filmic form and our experience with movies.

Clearly the most gaudy part of this formal inquiry is the fact that it is a documentary (probably the least profitable cinematic form) made in 3D (probably the most expensive, showiest format). At some level you can understand that if you get the access to the cave that Herzog got, it only makes sense to make as much with it as you can. We viewers will never get to visit the cave ourselves (access is extremely limited to a few scientists each year), so we should be able to see it in a hyper-realistic format like 3D.

But this begs the question: What is a a hyper-realistic format? Would any method be more naturalistic than this? Is anything that is shot on film and projected onto a screen (or played digitally) really going to be like it is in the world, or is our understanding of the verisimilitude of the style overstated? I think Herzog is showing us here that what we perceive to be a given reality is frequently far from the truth.

Similarly our understanding of the paintings and the people who created them is never going to be complete and, in the end, is only guess work, despite a tremendous amount of time and effort spent researching them. We will never know if what appears to be an altar with a bear skull on it is really an altar or just a random thing that one person 30,000 years ago might have done done day for no particular reason. Formality, here, is a haphazard thing and not something we should put too much stock in.

This is underlined, I think, at a moment when two scientists are speaking about one wall where a person put a series of hand-prints on the wall. We see the two women standing in the foreground and see the wall they're talking about in the distance. As the 3D was processed in post-production from a 2D print (as opposed to being shot in 3D with multiple cameras), part of the area between the women (that is in the background) that surrounds their silhouettes is partially brought to the foreground.

One could see this as a technical mistake, but I'm not sure Herzog would leave something as obvious in the film. I think he's showing us that this 3D view is not what it seems; it is as much a construction as the scientific theories that these women are talking about are. Everything we see in the world is affected by our own view of the world. The scientists who are researching this cave are looking at it from a 20th/21st Century point of view. They are in the space themselves with their own human psychology changing their hypotheses. Nothing is pure or exact.

At one point a scientist working on mapping all the markings on the walls says that after spending a few consecutive days in the cave looking at drawings of lions, he went home and dreamed about lions that night. Herzog asked him if he dreamed about the lion drawings from the cave or about real lions that he'd seen on TV or in person. The man responds, "both". This is a very important moment because what the man is describing is exactly what happens when you watch a movie. At some point in the experience, you stop noticing you are watching on a screen and your mind goes "into" the picture. The mediation vanishes and you are somehow not in the theater (or living room), but a direct witness of what you're watching.

The documentary form is a kind of mediation as well and Herzog reminds us over and over again that as much as we can study the cave paintings, we will never know what the people who made them meant or thought. There are a lot of plays with documentary formalism and he breaks several rules of technique. Herzog narrates the film, but is also a character in it (as he's done with many of his documentaries), you see his crew in many of the shots and he even says to us directly that they would be there and he speaks of the camera they use to shoot (I don't know for sure, but I think it was a standard HD camera that was later converted to 3D). All of these things are normally cut out of documentaries to make them seem more "pure", but Herzog leaves them in. He's reminding us that these things get between us and the so-called "reality" of the cave - the same way the great distance of time gets between us and the cave painters.

In another sequence Herzog shows two drawings that are next to one another and says that they were actually painted more than 5000 years apart. (The drawings are about 30,000 years old and the cave has been sealed by a rock slide at the entrance for more than 10,000 years.) He makes a comment about how the people who lived at the time the paintings were done had a different idea of the passage of time than we do. Time gets compressed for us modern people over the great span of years. After that much distance, we can only imagine what their "forgotten dreams" were - assuming they had any in the first place.

There is still a stunning proximity to these drawings and to the time and place where they were painted. Some of the drawings show now-extinct animals, like mammoths, cave lions and cave bears when they lived in what is now called Europe. It is really stunning to consider that these beings we learned about in paleontology class, always distant fantasies, honestly roamed the world at the same time as human species. Suddenly these things don't seem so far away, suddenly the things we have imagined about these species comes alive. Our dreams and imagination, the opposite of mediation, become science.

For me, this is a logical pair to Herzog's 2008 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, another film ostensibly about science, but really about human existence and the lack of knowledge we really have about our world and ourselves. These films can be seen on a very straight-forward level, as movies about specific places (Antarctica or the Chauvet Cave), but they can also been seen at deeper, more existential levels.

Humans are creative beings, we make paintings and movies, but the reasons for doing those things is not always clear when they are made and even less clear as our time passes. This film will become like the paintings, a totem from a forgotten moment of expression. We shouldn't put too much importance on it.

In Herzog's view, the world is generally a thankless, horrible place where misery is around every corner. For him, these drawings are as much about the futility of creativity, due to its formal elements and its necessary contextual relevance, as they are about the human hope for documenting the past and leaving something for the future. We have no idea who these people are and it is rather silly to get into trying to understand them, but the study of these people itself is an interesting thing to examine inasmuch as it reflects on us and our view of our own humanity.

Stars: 4 of 4

Waste Land (2010) (Friday, February 11, 2011) (182)

Waste Land is a documentary that kills two birds with one stone when it comes to making white people feel good about themselves. It's about art and social justice! Yay! It follows Brazilian star artist (startist?) Vic Muniz as he goes to Jardim Gramacho (literally meaning Gramacho Garden... no so much...), the landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro and one of the world's biggest landfills, makes art with the poor pickers who sort through the mounds of junk looking for recyclables.

Muniz, who was born in Brazil, talks about how he sorted through garbage himself after he arrived in the United States 20-some years ago. The work was humbling, to be sure, but also get him inspiration to make the interesting art he makes. He normally takes found objects, sometimes garbage, sometimes sugar, sometimes toys, sometimes chocolate sauce and makes representational images with them before shooting photographs of these arrangements. He is best known for taking well known paintings and pictures by other artists and re-making them out of these found objects. It's a very interesting process and one that I like a lot aesthetically. I think it's fascinating how he removes the viewer from the subject of the work by at least one degree. This is a very clever post-modern process and it does it beautifully.

So back on the ground in Gramacho, Muniz spends a few days walking around the heaps of trash interviewing the pickers there and figuring out who runs what. He meets a few of the labor leaders who are organizing the pickers into an ad hoc union, he meets a man who has such a positive outlook on life you wouldn't know he worked in smelly junk for a living, he meets a woman who has three kids and works as a picker because she can't find any other work.

He takes some portraits of these people, and then sets to working with them to gather certain kinds of garbage that they will use to make the works. I like how in the process of making the art, Muniz (and the directors) shows us how these people do what they do so effectively. He shows us how when they need plastic water bottles the people can find them and when they need rubber tires they can get those too.

Ultimately he has the group of subjects lay the garbage down on the floor of a big warehouse where the image of their portraits is shown on the ground. They place the items, with his helpful instruction, so they end up with large-scare pictures of themselves. Through the process, the pickers learn a new respect for one another and for the beauty in the world.

This is a nice story, but is a bit annoying, to be honest. I like what Muniz does, and I think he does it with an extreme humility and honor throughout. I think the filmmakrs Lucy Walker, Karen Harley and Joao Jardim (Jesus! They needed three directors!) think that what is being done here is really important, when really it's just an art project. Sadly most of these people will ultimately have to go back to the landfill at some point in the future and most of them suffer from all sorts of diseases they get from working in such filth (from metal poisoning to lung disease, not to mention the terrible education and social services they don't receive). It's a bit annoying that this shows us a window into a really terrible thing and we see a non-solution to dealing with it. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think a more polemical view of the situation would have been good. Why not pressure the Brazilian government (which is experiencing unparalleled growth currently) to help these people better?

This film is very reminiscent of another trash documentary from 2010, Garbage Dreams. That was more interesting because it approached the issue from a more sociopolitical point of view. I thought it showed more about Egyptian society than this film showed about Brazilian society. Neither one is wonderful, but aside from Muniz, whose art and personality are fantastic, there is not much here that's very good.

Stars: 2 of 4

Marwencol (Sunday, October 31, 2010) (145)

Filmmaker Jeff Malmberg brings us the film Marwencol, a light-gonzo and wonderful documentary about Mark Hogancamp and his weird "hobby". Several years ago, Hogancamp had the crap beaten out of him (apparently for no particular reason, although maybe there was...) as he left a bar in Kingston, New York. After spending months recovering in the hospital, he found himself back in his modest house with serious brain damage.

At this point he began playing with large-size G.I. Joe-like action figures and created a world in his backyard where he re-enacted fabulous World War II scenes involving the Nazi occupation of the Belgian town of Marwencol (I'm not sure such a town exists). Hogancamp populated the village with figures representing himself (much taller and better looking, but plastic, of course), several of his friends and relations (his lawyer and the DA got figures for themselves), and a world of female bartenders and whores (though really nice and gold-hearted ones, dontcha know). Of course there is also a gang of Nazi soldiers who live in the town.

Hogancamp then began photographing the stories he would create to document the War and the day-t0-day life in the village. Sometimes the Nazi gang would take Mark's double and beat him (like he was beaten outside the bar), sometimes the American soldiers would beat up on the Nazis... because Nazi's are dicks. Sometimes they would all drink peaceably in the bar. Without knowing it, Mark created his own sort of "art therapy" to deal with the psychological pain (PTSD, to be sure) and get a handle on what happened to him.

Malmberg treats Hogancamp's work with the utmost respect and non-judgement. He also frequently puts the camera down on the ground level so we are inside the world of Marwencol interacting with the toy figures. As Mark narrates the story of each scene, we feel the drama of the story he creates. It is really a beautiful presentation.

Ultimately Mark's work is discovered by the New York art world and he is offered a one-man show in Chelsea. We see him struggle with the trip down to the city... and with several secrets that he lives with on a daily basis (I'm not going to tell the secrets here, because they are revealed so wonderfully). Again, Malmberg's gentleness and respect of Hogancamp is wonderful to see in how he deals with his unusualness.

This is a very small movie, but also a very powerful one. I expected this to be rather silly, but it was deeply moving and interesting. What I love is that Hogancamp's "art" is really interesting and aesthetically fabulous and that he basically came up with this "therapy" entirely on his own... and that he wouldn't consider what he's doing either "art" of "therapy".

The presentation is fantastic and I particularly appreciate that Malmberg didn't try to do more with this film than just present the story. There are no significant interviews with art world elites, nor is much time spent on the medical background for what is happening. Malmberg's restraint in this case is especially admirable.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

October Country (Friday, October 29, 2010) (142)

More than a documentary film, per se, October Country is a visual artwork about the Mosher family in in the Mohawk Valley of New York. Co-directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher present us with a taste of real-life Americana: big, complicated families struggling to pay bills and stick together, helping one another, fighting and dealing with drinking, drugs and jail and watching the July 4th fireworks from the parking lot of their WalMart.

What we see is certainly a document, but it is so visually gorgeous that the narrative we're presented with, the lives of these honest working-class people, is almost less important than the overall stylistic feeling of the work. I once heard a film described as impressionistic in tone and style, and have to say that if there was ever a work that met that concept, this is it.

This is the story of the Mosher family through several generations. The grandmother Dottie and her husband Don lead the clan. She's a smart and good woman and the most stable person in the family. He is a hard Vietnam Vet who struggles with PTSD as much as he struggles to be a father and grandfather. He has good instincts about people, but can't deal with stuff on the ground.

Their daughter is Donna, a likable woman who constantly gets involved with destructive men. Donna has two kids we see onscreen, Doneal and Desi (I assume Donal is either Donna's son as well, though it is never said directly, I don't think). Doneal is now a mother herself and struggling with her own abusive baby-daddy. Finally, throw into the mix Chris, a local boy who Dottie and Don have tried adopting, but who can't stay out of trouble and Denise, Don's sister who is rather estranged and now practices Wicca. This is a fucked-up family, but probably a very normal family. Over the course of the year we see them, they act and react to things in very normal ways, but it's the texture of the film that really adds their story beauty.

There is an overwhelmingly melancholy tone here, but melancholy brought up to the artistic, expressive level of Hamlet. It is dripping with frankness and powerful sadness. I know this is an inconsiderate thing for me to sit here and just their lives as pitiful, but I can feel nothing other than this. I am not sure the Mosher's would disagree much, but they just wouldn't think about it much. What we see is that their lives don't involve much reflection or analysis; they know their positions, they push ahead and they deal with stuff as it comes up.

Ghosts are a powerful theme throughout this film. We are told that the Herkimer County, NY is considered one of the most-haunted parts of our country (by people who measure these things) and the Mosher family is clearly haunted by their past decisions and actions. We see the family celebrating Halloween and, of course, see aunt Denise practicing Wicca.

The cinematography, editing and beautiful music (by the two filmmakers as well as Danny Grody and Kenric Taylor) all capture this haunted and dark quality of the setting and the story as well. Much of the film is shot at night, with the jet black sky looming over everything. The interiors are illuminated with cheap bulbs and strings of holiday lights, giving everything a yellowish, muddy quality - but the camera's own pure white light makes everything jump out bright and crisp. It has the feeling of Kadachrome prints in that to colors are bright, but backgrounds are dull (of course there's a long history of Kodak in melancholy Upstate, New York).

Part of me feels like it could be a bit unfair and manipulative for Donal Mosher to present his family in this way. How are we to react to them other than feel deep pity and embarrassment for their situation? But of course, he's not really judging, he's just presenting us with their story and adding an aesthetic frame of reference, which could easily come out of his own experience. This is after all a film he wrote, so it is not ridiculous to think that this is his way of working through his own ghosts and feelings about the region and his family. That is exactly what art does, no?

Stars: 3.5 of 4

I'm Still Here (Sunday, September 12, 2010) (116)

It is important to note before I start this post that I saw this film on September 12, 2010 thinking it was a legitimate film about a man's mental and professional collapse. I didn't write about it immediately and by September 17, 2010 or so, it was clear that the film was a hoax, an art piece, a stunt. Now a week or so after that, I have to analyze the film that I viewed knowing that somehow what I saw and how I reacted were part of a bigger project. One could argue about whether or not this is fair, and I think this debate is very interesting. I think the whole process of this film is interesting, not only what we see onscreen, but the reactions to it in the press.

I'm Still Here is ostensibly a work of non-fiction directed by Casey Affleck about his friend and brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix during 2008 and 2009 as he tried to transition from an actor to a rapper. Phoenix's life is falling apart during this time as his music career is not coming together they way he would want it to and he begins to lose his grip on normalcy, not shaving for weeks (and looking more and more rugged and homeless as a result), snorting cocaine off the asses of prostitutes, performing a terrible show in Miami and vomiting after a fight with a belligerent audience member. It was during this time that he notoriously went on the David Letterman show and had a career collapse while promoting the beautiful film Two Lovers.

The film is in fact is a pseudo-documentary where everything we see is part of a set-up and not real. Phoenix and Affleck conceived of the whole thing (though there was certainly some improvisation) and many of the most uncomfortable moments (like the Letterman thing or a weird scene where Ben Stiller tries to get Phoenix to play the buddy in his film Greenberg) are either written ahead of time or conceived of with the participation of the other people. (I clearly don't know what went into every scene and there has to be some fooling of people along the way. Phoenix's publicist clearly is not in on the joke as her reaction after the Letterman debacle is just too real; I'm not sure Diddy is in on the joke as his reactions are also too painful, uncomfortable and hilarious to be fake.)

Throughout the film as we see Phoenix fall deeper and deeper into a black hole there is a constant question of what Affleck is doing letting these terrible things happen to his friend. Why is he staying mostly behind the camera and not coming out to help his friend and lend him a hand. This might be one of the biggest tip-offs that the film is not totally what it seems. But just as you start thinking Affleck is being a cruel enabler watching his friend fall down a cliff, the last 10-or-so minutes of the film are a rather beautiful quiet sequence where Phoenix goes to Panama to visit his father. With no dialogue, this scene conveys emotion, sympathy and compassion in a way most young filmmakers are not able to do. For me this segment was so convincing that it led me directly into the "believing it" camp.

But considering it's not real, credit has to go to Phoenix for one of the best performances I've seen in awhile. He is totally disgusting physically and socially and totally believable. Throughout the piece, Phoenix is constantly defending himself from people who think he's faking it (of course he was) and he deals with this very well - as if he was really a man going through a life crisis that nobody believed was real. Affleck also does a great job of placing enough doubt in the first part of the film to make us ask the question "is this real?", as a way of doubling down the prank. I had trouble accepting that the film was a hoax as I felt Affleck did too many things that a director would only do if the story was real. I couldn't get past the fact that the film was so self-aware that it was just a fake.

Now that mainstream reviewers are aware of the hoax, many of them are very angry with the situation. I think this is an interesting lesson in how the Hollywood media machine makes "hits," and how reviewers covet their "access" to early screenings of movies. That the announcement came after basically all the major reviews had been written, but before many people in the world had seen it is interesting - and basically a big Fuck You to the reviewing establishment. There certainly were a handful of reviewers who thought the story was too weird to be true, but I would chalk those up to lucky guesses as I think there is simply not enough evidence in the film to know that for a certainly that the piece is phony. I think many reviewers now are upset that they were fooled and are letting this affect what they say about the picture rather than looking at the merits of the piece itself. Do they not think a well-executed hoax is an impressive feat?

I am also interested in what this film tells us about our media culture and our obsession with so-called "reality". Everything from Twitter and Facebook to reality TV comes down to the fact that we expect everybody to be available at all times. We don't flinch as much as we used to at a man who is clearly suffering onscreen (or convincingly playing like he is). That we can watch him do some of the most disgusting things we've ever seen onscreen (like having a friend shit on his face as a prank) is just par for the course these days. We have all become voyeurs complicit in the evisceration of a man and his career.

The title, I'm Still Here, reminds me of Todd Haynes' biopic of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There, which told his story with multiple actors playing different aspects of the musician's life and mythology. Here we get one man with multiple aspects of his character (a jerk, a frightened kid, a friend, a phony musician, an artist) and we don't know what is real and what is fiction anymore. Clearly what we see is not "real", but are there not some honest moments hidden in there somewhere?

Stars: 3 of 4

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (Tuesday, July 27, 2010) (85)

The opening sequence of The Radiant Child shows a few title cards where director Tamra Davis explains how the film got started. She writes that she was a friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early- and mid-1980s, and interviewed him in 1986. After the interview she put the footage aside for awhile not knowing what to do with it. When he died of a drug overdose in 1988, she decided to put the interview away and not use it. Recently she came back to the footage deciding she could do something with it now.

In this introduction, Davis leads us to believe that this film would be based on her interview with Basquiat, maybe leading us to new insights from the never-before-seen reels. What we get though is really nothing of the sort; this is a pure bio-doc, and a very good one at that. Through interviews with contemporaries, ex-girlfriends, art critics, downtown scenesters and friends, not to mention the 1986 interview, we see a very thorough and clear picture of this brilliant, troubled artist.

I am interested by the fact that in all the years I studied art history and have admired Basquiat's work - and felt very viscerally affected by it - I have always felt the need to "understand" it better. The mystery in the layers and layers of paint, images and text always bemused me; I wanted to get to a deeper level with the works, always feeling left somewhat on the outside. This film, in explaining who he was and how he worked, showed me that there is no real "deeper" understanding of this work. His work is almost purely emotional with touch points of (sometimes obscure) cultural literacy and identity peppered throughout.

At one point in the interview he speaks about how when he goes to paint, he turns on the television "for source material". This is totally revelatory to me. What might seem like a trite or cute line by a young artist working today, totally encapsulates how I would understand his work now. Yes, there are many levels to his work, but like with a television, there's a lot of stuff that is there that you don't need to worry about. His work is a cypher for the cultural world.

Davies employs a great soundtrack in the film, much of it being the artists and musicians who were in the same downtown scene that Basquiat was in (Blondie, the Velvet Underground), some being music of the era that might not have been downtown per se (early hip hop from the Bronx), and lots of be-bop, which Basquiat listened to constantly. The use of the bop here really underlines how much his paintings have in common with that style. That Charlie Parker or Dizzie Gillespie could improvise and chop up standards into smaller interesting bits is very similar to the technical and aesthetic qualities of Basquiat's work.

The film is really wonderfully directed. It moves along very smoothly and seems to tell his whole life story, getting into his psychology relating to his complicated relationship with his parents, showing how he came on the scene with tons of talent and no access and became a millionaire looking to become friends with the cool kids (Andy Warhol). Davis cuts the film beautifully, especially the montages showing his paintings and still photographs of him working in the studio.

I don't know why she started the film with this suggestion that it would use her '86 interview so much, because we really only get about 10 or 15 minutes of it at most (and most of it is not very interesting as he's clearly rolling on heroin during it). This documentary really is a great work of biography and is illuminating, even for an art lover like myself.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Art of the Steal (Friday, February 26, 2010) (17)

This is a documentary about the Barnes Foundation outside of Philadelphia - arguably the greatest single collection of impressionist and post-impressionist works of art in the world. Founder and creator Albert C. Barnes gathered the works in the early 20th Century and was widely mocked by the Philadelphia establishment at the time for buying what was then considered to be bad art. He then set up his foundation in a suburb of the town, in Lower Merion, for students and scholars and made a point of not allowing it to be loaned or toured.

After Barnes death, the bylaws of the foundation kept the rigid structure he had set forth, but left its board in the control of Lincoln University, an under-funded Historically Black College in Philadelphia. Over the years as the collection aged and its building began to need work, money was needed.

Richard Glanton, then president of the board, decided to raise money by breaking the bylaws and touring the collection around the world. He then got in a ridiculous battle with the neighbors over what he perceived to be a racist slur. A big lawsuit followed that drained even more money from the Barnes coffers.

In the end, the foundation was out of money and looked to Philadelphia for help. Everybody in the city wanted to move the collection and everybody had a reason why Barnes' vision of a collection out of town for research and not profit was outdated and unsustainable. Ultimately with court approval, the foundation was able to raise $150million and allowed to move inside the city and out of sleepy Merion.

Almost none of this story and none of the film is fresh and new. It has been told many times in newspaper and magazine articles and Internet reports. I've read the story at least twice. The filmmaker, Don Argott, not only recycles old material, but he's incredibly one-sided with the story. He paints Glanton and politicians like Ed Rendell as villains and a handful of board members or former associates as heroes.

It's not totally polemical because it does interview the opposition and give them their time to make their points, but not totally fair either. It's a very one-sided argument, but seems almost too lazy and uninspired to be venomous. Overall the story itself is wonderfully Shakespearean in nature (a great collection put together by a controlling king that is then essentially sold off by his careless princes) told in a one-sided fashion.

The elegance of the story - especially that the Annenberg Foundation which was created by one of Barnes' biggest enemies is now the white knight arriving to save the day - is all but lost in the midst of the blame being slung around. It is not nearly as interesting as it could be and Argott deserves blame for this. In the end, this is a very decent movie, but not at all a great one.

Stars: 2 of 4

La Danse - Le Ballet de l'Opera de Paris (Saturday, November 2, 2009) (176)

Frederick Wiseman has made a career of very interesting documentaries with a clinical, dispassionate style. In this film he spends a few months with the Paris Opera Ballet company showing an 'all-access' look at the troupe's creative and administrative process. This is a long film, to be sure - 160 minutes long - but it does not drag much and keeps our interest throughout pretty well.

Wiseman's style is consists of setting a camera in a room and recording what goes on in front of it. There is no commentary and no particular 'director's voice'. It is documentary filmmaking in the Maysles model. It is as pure a document as one can imagine.

Much of the film shows the dancers rehearsing their routines with their choreographers and creative directors. We see at least six different numbers (maybe more - I might have lost track of a few of them) from their early stages through their final productions on stage. The rehearsal spaces, in the cupola of the old neo-Baroque Paris Opera theater, are themselves something wonderful to behold. But more than that, it is fascinating to see how the choreographers work on the most subtle movements of the dancers to change the entire tone of a work.

In addition to the artistic side, we also see the business and management side of things. We see Brigitte Lefèvre, the creative director and force of nature that has her hand in every part of the company from casting to fundraising. She's a tough lady, but clearly brilliant and totally respected by everyone we see (of course they have to respect her on camera because they would be cut if they didn't). In one scene, we see the development committee talking about an event for the 'American Friends' of the ballet, organizing events for the $5,000 and $25,000 donations. (Unintentional laughs result from a comment about Lehman Brothers executives giving money. Ooops!)

Wiseman gives us a glimpse of almost every small part of the production and every small support department. We see a guy vacuuming the boxes and cleaning the aisles of the orchestra, we see the costume designers working on upcoming shows, we see the cafeteria where administrators and dancers eat lunch side by side, we see the union labor discussions. It's all rather fascinating.

What I find especially interesting is the fact that this movie, which really has no particular 'point-of-view' and no directorial 'voice', feels rather strange because of it's nonchalance. That is to say that the film works as a mirror on the current documentary films and how nearly everything I have seen recently has a specific slant - and much of it being outright polemic. When faced with a film like this one, the *unbiased*, document-ness of it feels rather uncomfortable. Am I that corrupted by contemporary directors and their opinions?

For me, this is as much a formal exploration as it is a cinematic experience. The film is basically one scene after another with very little (other than some general chronology) linking one moment to the next. I think one of my frustrations with it is that ends rather abruptly - but it would be impossible to know how else to end it, I guess. It is as if the film is counting upwards with scenes - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. - moving easily from one thing to another. That it ends, say, on 25, rather than 20, is totally fair.

It does bring to my mind similar frustrations I had with Christo's mega-installation The Gates in 2005. That was also a formal exercise, I think. It's scope was breathtaking, but it's execution was sometimes mysterious and hard for me to follow. I had trouble with the fact that the individual gates were different in size and strangely varied different in distance from one to the next. This might have been part of a greater scheme, but to me, it felt too random and unfulfilling.

I get the same general feeling from this film. I recognize it as a beautiful work of art, but there are some editing and pacing decisions that don't totally make sense. But they don't make sense on a more fundamental level than a spot level. That is, I think there might be a big design that Wiseman has for the structure of the picture, but I can't see it and don't know what it is. I can say that I want to know more about the precess and the thinking behind the film - and hope there's more to learn.

I think this is a very beautiful and interesting movie. It might be a bit too long for casual viewing, but it probably is not a film that should be casually viewed. It is might be a bit too serious - but that's the point, I guess. (Like saying a war movie is too bloody or too violent.)

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Rembrandt's J'Accuse (Sunday, October 25, 2009) (153)

Peter Greenaway is an interesting filmmaker - and by interesting, I mean that he makes weird, off-beat movies that are not always successful and sometimes are downright bad. It is no surprise then that a documentary by him would also be non-standard and a bit cheeky.

In this film, Greenaway presents a case for how Rembrandt's The Nightwatch is actually an artistic indictment of the painting's subjects having murdered a man to enhance their political power. He presents 31 pieces of evidence and unusual variations in the painting that lead him to this conclusion and he tells a very compelling story that leaves us totally convinced about Rembrandt's motives and the guilt of the accused men.

Formally the film is very interesting. Throughout most of it, Greenaway appears in a box at the bottom of the screen talking directly to us as he makes his arguments. We do not see art or academic historians, but Greenaway makes points from the point of view of those experts. In the background are close-ups of the painting itself as well as dramatic re-enactments of Rembrandt speaking to the men he was painting getting them set up in costumes and staging them. There are also scenes where Greenaway questions and cross-examines the historical figures (again, actors in period costumes) as if in a murder trial.

Of course, the film is is it's own formal work of art - and reminiscent of how modern and contemporary artists (Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, etc.) have re-examined the old masters in their works. It is a fresh look at a somewhat stuffy old work. It sounds totally dumb to say, but he really makes the work come to life - and not just because he has actors impersonating the characters on the canvas. He adds all sorts of behind-the-scenes drama that makes the dark background of the painting brighten for a moment. He does this with a tongue planted firmly in his cheek - though it is not silly, just self-aware. This is probably Greenaway's most successful work in a decade or more. It's a lot of fun!

Stars: 3 of 4

The Yes Men Fix the World (Sunday, October 11, 2009) (146)

The Yes Men are a post-modern political hoax duo whose mission is to expose corporate greed and fraud through elaborate public pranks. Their targets are the traditional big-meanies of the multi-national corporate landscape, from Halliburton and Dow to the wrong-headed mosaic of government agencies that work in New Orleans re-building after Hurricane Katrina. This film, written and directed by the pair themselves, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, is a tongue-in-cheek look at some of their more famous and powerful works that brought them the largest amount of attention.



Their most successful act began with them setting up a website that appeared to look like an 'ethics' arm of Dow Chemical. Approaching the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster (where tens of thousands of people were killed from a massive chemical spill and then thousands more died in the following years from the damage) the Yes Men, posing as Dow executives, were invited on to BBC to speak about the company's reaction to the situation it created.



Bichlbaum, under an assumed name, spoke on camera about how sorry the company was that the event occurred, and how they were going to accept full responsibility for their actions and pay the victims and their families with several billions of dollars. Of course, Dow has never admitted to any amount of responsibility and has been totally unhelpful to the Indian city.



Moments after the interview, top headlines around the world reported this gigantic turn-around in message and unparallelled restitution money. Of course, it was only a matter of minutes before Dow's real spokespeople contacted news media to say that in fact the Yes Men were pranksters and that they still don't take responsibility for their actions and still will not pay any money to the Indians who were hurt.



This, in the end is the real art of the Yes Men - getting big companies and government bodies to specifically defend indefensible beliefs, policies and messages.



This film is a much more successful indictment of corporate greed and capitalism run awry than the recent Michael Moore movie, Capitalism: A Love Story. The Yes Men know that there are not two sides to every story (as Arriana Huffington has been saying for a few years now). There is not real scientific *debate* about evolution or climate change - so it's foolish for news reports to give 'equal time' to both sides. There is not a real moral pro and a con to Dow paying back victims of their chemical spill - they messed up and they should help the victims of the accident. That there are corporate suits and apologists who would defend the faceless company is sickening and, simply, bad. The Yes Men try to expose these problems.



They are not shrill, rather they are funny and friendly. In the film, they hatch their next 'attacks' from their modest super-hero den, as if they were poor, kitschy Batmans. This is a very funny and clever doc that leaves you feeling empowered by these modern-day Davids versus Goliath. I can't wait to see what they do next!



Stars: 3 of 4