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Deb 6 Me 6

Back in 1990 there was a HBO special featuring an unknown Tim Allen doing an act titled “Men are Pigs”. I cracked up. Then the guy got a TV show based on the material and I didn’t pay much attention. Each TV episode was based on a single bit or line from the stand-up show. The TV version was stretched and watered down to the point it became inane and I didn’t watch it, although I liked the material it was based on.

So it is with mainstream movies. Usually they are based on a premise from a classic movie, sometimes a single plot line or even a phrase from an ageless film. Then it is stretched and diluted and disguised and presented as a new idea.

This flick has a respectable cast, we both like Catherine Keener, at least since she played Harper Lee in Capote. Oliver Platt is steady as a rock, and the gal that played Millie on the Dick Van Dyke Show had a big role and she was a treat.

The movie had a neat premise, people buy furniture from estates of the deceased and resell it for profit. Most everyone in the film is dysfunctional and has issues the others must deal with. There is guilt, there are laughs, they get old, blah blah. It seems to want to deal with big issues, but it’s just kind of a flat movie watered down to be palatable by the biggest number of moviegoers possible.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Deb 8 Me 9

First off, I like biographies and documentaries and this one appeared to cover a subject I know little about, street art. Street art in this movie is well done graffiti. The movie we went to see was about these guys who paint images in public spaces in the dark of the night (or, guys who vandalize other peoples buildings under the cover of darkness). But the movie was so much more.

There are three or four central players and a lot of cats in the periphery. There’s a guy called Space Invader who makes these neat little mosaics and glues them to surfaces all over London. He has a quirky cousin Thierry who is a maniac behind the video camera, can’t shut it off, videos everything he sees. Thierry tapes Space Invader posting his art and starts taping other people doing it too. Thierry returns to L.A. and continues recording these nefarious exhibits. Soon we are introduced to Shepard Fairy, best known for his Obama portrait that was plastered everywhere in 2008. We get an unusual insight to these accomplished artists and their criminal expressions.

Chief among them is a guy called Banksy, a gutsy graffitist who really has it all. Talent, vision and balls as big as they come. I say that because they show him painting the silhouette of a child being lifted by balloons over the barrier wall on Israel’s West Bank. I mean he’s making a great western statement with loaded mid-eastern machine guns watching. You can tell from his work, this guy is truly phenomenal. And he is the only cat Thierry hasn’t captured on tape.

Here’s the blurb on the movie: Eccentric French shop owner Thierry Guetta attempts to capture the world of graffiti art by following many of the best known vandals at work. In doing so, Thierry tries to locate and befriend Banksy only to have the artist turn the camera back on him.

The movie takes this big 180 turn. It's two movies in one, more for your movie going dollar. Now we are watching Banksy’s movie about Theirry as he tries to create his own art based on what he has witnessed. It was kind of disturbing. The street artists are breaking the law and wrecking people’s property, but I think (at least some of them) are trying to make a statement about law and property by making their mark. This isn’t gang territorial stuff. But this Thierry guy has no artistic statement, skills or sensibilities, just the gifts of P.T. Barnum and a big bankroll. He now calls himself Mr. Brainwash and appears to be what most people think contemporary artists are; sham artists.

Now the film has these two factions, illegal art with integrity and art that is inane but profitable. It’s so great, this is stuff we (as artists) face everyday. People on the street think Picasso is a bad joke but think Kincaid is great; after all, look at how much money he makes. McDonald’s has sold more burgers than anyone, they must be the best burgers.

Now there are two distinct movies going on with some common threads running through them. It ends. You react to it, you think about it and if you’re lucky, you have someone to talk to about it. Soon another picture evolves from the footage and you realize you might not have been watching the movie you thought you were. There was a third movie enveloping the screen that doesn’t get developed until you are out of the theater, out in the dark of night. Give this movie some time and I think you’ll learn a thing or two and have a good time in the process.

Secret of Kells

Deb 2 Me 2

Whatever the Secret of Kells is remains a secret. The movie starts with a whispering voice that may have explained what the movie was about, but it was totally unintelligible. Then the cells unfurl that seemed to be based on Rocky and Bullwinkle artwork. Eventually a Willie Nelson looking character appears along with a ringer for Mr. Magoo. Matt Stroud, who had seen an interesting panel discussion featuring the makers of the Academy Award nominated animated features, touted us onto the movie. The guy that did this flick, Tomm Moore, was particularly animated himself and the clips shown were interesting. And there were some very interesting clips within the movie. There were some cool multi-plane camera effects, some scenes appeared to be backlit with a net mask, and lots of attractive tricks were employed. Their version of fire was really cool. I liked the sponge effect on most of the backgrounds. It was pretty. Scene transitions were often entertaining. I liked the music, not the songs, but the music was good.

But like many fantasy films the story wasn’t cohesive. I always think of Walt, who focused so much energy on the story, I mean why draw a single cell if it isn’t going to support a solid story? These days there is just too much razzle-dazzle that doesn’t support much of a tale. Deb was able to come up with some possible morals to the story. The only moral I could find was: don’t go to all this work until you know what you’re going to say with it. As always, we stayed for the complete credits, and as they flashed by came a voiceover, again, totally unitelligible. This time I could tell it seemed to be a different language, like old Gaelic or something, and wondered just who the hell was this thing aimed at?

Deb 2 Me 2

Dancing Across Borders

Deb 5 Me 4

This is a straightforward documentary about a lady who is captivated by a young dancer she sees while on vacation in Cambodia. She goes hoe to New York and decides she wants to bring him home and set him up in ballet school. The kid has never been out of his village and seizes the opportunity.

It turns out that he is tutored by ballet’s leading teacher, giving him one-on-one attention for many years. In this time he learns English remarkably well, gets his high school diploma and makes friends. He continues to dance and enters domestic and international competitions, even does a performance in his native Cambodia.

He is an engaging kid, and he is surrounded with articulate people who speak highly but realistically about his gifts. It’s interesting.

But it’s not great. There are a lot of issues that are introduced but not resolved. First off, who is this lady that “finds” him in the jungles and bankrolls his way to competency? Where’d she get the gall and the bucks? How does she convince the leading ballet teacher to take him on in such an exclusive basis? He gets serious cramps throughout the beginning of the movie and they’re never mentioned again, what happened with them? There are a lot of things that should be answered or not brought up.

It was neat to see the quality of documenting him improved as his talents were recognized. In the beginning when he was dancing native street theater stuff he was recorded on some lousy format like VHS or something. In NY they record him on a better format and by the time he’s dancing in big shows the picture clarity is really quite good. The interviews and staged shots are all excellent quality.

The overall feeling I got was that this was done too soon. It was neat to see him taken from living with rats to being in the rat race, but he hadn’t arrived anywhere as a dancer yet. Another unresolved issue for me. In the beginning of the movie he was full of potential, at the end of the movie he was full of potential. I’d like the moviemaker to have waited until he got a good job or won a big competition or gave up or something, to complete the story, or at least make more of a complete cycle.

Alice in Wonderland in 3-D

Deb 8.5 Me 3

Our second fantasy film of the year. Deb had read both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and appreciated the way the two books were consolidated (no one I’ve talked to has read the third installment, What Alice Found There). She loved the way the imagined world came to life and the tremendous attention to detail. And the world they created was brilliant, vibrant and full with zany characters. This type of movie requires the viewer to surrender their view of things and accept the world as they present it. And that’s sort of the point of Alice, as she challenges the rationale of her world after her experiences down the rabbit hole. Deb was able to see the movie the way it was meant to be seen, I wasn’t.

I’m already geared toward challenging things and so I have a hard time accepting the world that they presented. Why was caterpillar smoking, what was it smoking, why is it blue? I was wandering, twitching, comparing the images with and without the special glasses, wondering what significance each crazy critter may have had, if they were symbols for other things, or just being wacky. Unresolved questions distract me. Despite the vivid qualities of each scene, the film never caught my attention. I was constantly looking for historical references that may have inspired this or that, and the similarities between this story and the Wizard of Oz (written 35 years after the Alice books). Oddly, neither one of us had any comment about the 3-D element.

An Education

Deb 10 Me 10

English movies are a red flag. It’s hard for me to relate to their culture and often difficult to understand the dialog. I missed half a dozen words near the beginning of this movie but they either started talking normal or my ears acclimated early to the English accents.

Longevity is a green flag. We’ve been talking about seeing this movie since Christmas. Almost weekly we look at the list of movies in our area and utter the title out loud, saying “That would be good”, but see something else. Last night we did it again and figured this has to go away soon so we'd better see it. The guy at the ticket window said it has been playing there for three and a half months. We go in and there are a lot of people, way more than at an opening night movie we saw last week.

Deb has been thinking about the movie and has developed certain expectations. She’s thinking along the lines of Educating Rita and has built a whole movie up in her head. My head is empty.

The movie is set in 1962 in what looks like the English equivalent of Archie Bunkers place and features a Bristol 404, a way cool looking car. The accents fall away pretty quick, there’s an odd sunny day rain scene (which may happen in England) and it’s populated by an easy to look at cast. Then you start to get sucked in by the story.

When you look at the story line on the computer it says this: “In the post-war, pre-Beatles London suburbs, a bright schoolgirl is torn between studying for a place at Oxford and the more exciting alternative offered to her by a charismatic older man.” I won’t be telling you much more than that about the story.

But I’ll tell you this; in places it reminded me of Juno, a smart kid who tackles issues much larger than her; with high spirits, intelligence and enviable humor. And like Juno, there weren’t too many people I recognized as actors, so it’s more like a real life tale. Alfred Molina is easy to pick out of a crowd and Emma Thompson has a part, I guess a movie is not English unless she’s in it. But the people are likable and they’re behaving in believable ways and they’re moving the story along.

I guess this was what appealed to me. The story was tight. There wasn’t a bunch of characters that go nowhere, no dead-end sub plots and surprisingly, no unanswered questions at the end. It’s a good old-fashioned story movie. It’s a plausible tale that’s well told with actors who don’t feel like they’re acting, places that don’t look like movie sets (except for one) and good fodder for conversation afterwards.

The Art of The Steal

Deb 7 Me 8

This movie is a straight documentary. It looks like it was made for TV and I hope it is aired soon so more people can enjoy it. I really liked it. The subject is the art collection of the Barnes Foundation, a topic Deb and I have been interested in for many years.

I don’t want to give anything away, but here’s the basic points. A guy named Barnes starts buying art. He buys quality art from quality artists, and he buys it just ahead of the curve of social recognition. By the time the rest of world figures out that Renoir and Picasso and VanGogh are the real thing, he has amassed a huge collection of them. People that were dogging his collection now envied it.

But it was his collection and he built a nice place to house it and placed his own restrictions on who and how it could be seen. He made an art school and the students had first hand access to the collection. He wanted to keep the snobs and social elite at bay, welcoming the students and the “common man”. If you were Rockefeller you probably had a harder time seeing the collection that if you were Rockefeller’s gardener.

And Barnes put that in his will too. He decreed that the collection stay in tact exactly as he hung it, for perpetuity. It wasn’t to be sold, loaned out or even moved. It wasn’t to be offered to the general public, open to select viewers no more than two days a week. It was never to become a backdrop for hoity-toity elitists.

Over time the collection became extremely valuable and a power struggle emerged over control of the art. That’s the story the film explores and it’s fascinating. This is a very interesting study of the struggle for power by people who don’t take no for an answer. If you’re not interested in art, draw your own parallels, antique cars, baseball cards, furniture. It could be a family story, heirs fighting over their parents estate, but it’s a good story and worth checking out.

Deb gave it 7 and I ran it up to 8. Looking back we each think it warrants more.