I knew Jimmy. He was brilliant, charming, passionate, humane, intellectually and emotionally complex, fun and funny, and utterly fascinating and exciting to be with. I knew him the last few years of his life, late 1980s. He was traveling throughout the United States to see old friends and haunts. It was his last lap, his stomach cancer was incurable. He also wanted to take measure of his country–if life had changed for the better for African-Americans in a decade.
Read MoreSpain is not a country that I immediately associate with either historical or avant-garde animation, so I was curious–what is Spanish animation, and what makes it distinctly Spanish? Will these films be interesting for normal people who aren’t obsessed with Spain like I am, or will my boyfriend resent me for dragging him out to see obscure Spanish short animations on a Friday night?
Read MoreThe five nominees for short live action films showing at the Ritz at the Bourse don’t waste much time getting down to business, starting with the French entry, “Ennemis Interieurs,” directed by Selim Azzazi. The fictional story is set during the Algerian civil war (1991-2002) and at a time when French citizens on French soil were being targeted by terrorists. The two main characters of the film, known simply as the Applicant and the Interrogator (both from Algeria), enact an interview for French citizenship. If you ever have been through an interview for citizenship in the west–and I am speaking from experience–there aren’t too many pleasant moments in which you feel like you are welcome during the interrogation about your background, name, or religion.
Read MoreThe film captures the mood of sorrow and pain, and the quest for freedom, that has always marked the plight of the refugee, and which surely marks the tragic plight of the 65 million people who recently have been forced to leave their homes around the world. It is well worth five minutes of your emotional time.
Read MoreThe double bill at the Film Forum will take you 90 minutes. It’s a must-see 90-minutes. The documentaries on Elizabeth Murray, (“Everybody Knows…Elizabeth Murray” by Kristi Zea) and Carmen Herrera (“The 100 Year Show” by Alison Klayman) immerse you in the biographies and studio practices of two great artists who had spark and ideas, worked hard, never gave up, and are examples to us all.
Read MoreWhether it was intended or not, “The Battle of Algiers” provides a visual blueprint for urban warfare. Its sympathetic portrayal of the guerrillas celebrates the freedom fighters but does not show a path beyond urban warfare and into peaceful resolution. I can only hope that new viewers of the film will understand the lessons it has to offer and not just absorb the blueprint.
Read MoreHoning in on the small body of work left to us by Hieronymus Bosch (some 25 paintings in museums across the world), the film opens with a series of luscious details of paint. Although cracking with age, the surface of the paintings still bears witness to the agile brush and even more agile mind of the artist. Lovingly detailed brushwork brings an almost jewel-like precision to the perverse devils and monsters that populate Bosch’s paintings, their forms dissolving into abstractions of color, line, and shape through the magnifying lens of the camera. The film is a paean to close looking, the sort of slow and deep observation that so few people seem to engage in–after all, recent studies have suggested that the average museum visitor spends about 15–30 seconds looking at a work of art.
Read MoreJulie Dash’s The Great Migration observes the closing of one chapter of history for many African Americans–life in the unforgiving South–and the beginning of another–an arduous journey North towards an uncertain future. The opening scene of the film, a beach at first light shot in soft muted color, is a fitting metaphor for this transition. A solitary suitcase sits on the sand, a totem for countless histories both individual and communal. At this point of departure where land ends and sea begins, the memories of these emigrants bridge all physical borders, and as the sole remaining traveler, the suitcase is our window into a narrative whose roots run deep and whose branches continue to grow.
Read More“Maggie’s Plan” is a pleasant, intriguing film. Greta Gerwig stars as the Greta Gerwig we met in “Frances Ha.” But the other two actors, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore, play abstruse academics as successful writers. The film postulates that their characters are more intelligent than the Gerwig character. Moore with her Danish accent might be based on writer/director Rebecca Miller’s mother Inge Morath. Hawke might be said to resemble her father Arthur Miller. Who, ergo, is Greta Gerwig but–Marilyn Monroe? She’s no Greta Garbo. The film’s a screwball comedy that makes me speculate. And of course Miller is married to–Daniel Day-Lewis.
Read More“I did it because I could,” says Rocky 184, the one woman grafitti writer who gets a deep look in the movie. The self-proclaimed tomboy from Washington Heights is not alone in her unfocused motivation. “I was bored,” says Snake 1. It was not political, say a number of the others. The best, nuanced comment is from Cool Earl, who says “It was a sign of the times, a sign of our youth, our lack of funds and perhaps our lack of paternal guidance.”
Read MoreThe film, about a talented, articulate and ambitious artist, raises an important question. Why is an artist overlooked? A movie can’t answer definitively, but in 84 fast-paced and colorful minutes Art Bastard delivers a hint of why a rebellious yet loveable personality and his rollicking, politically-charged and mostly humorous paintings are under the New York art world radar. In the words of the movie’s smartest commentator, the oracular Richard Armstrong, Director of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, “It’s about chance and geography.”
Read MoreSome of the most compelling sequences in Wright’s documentary consist of the artist’s reflections on perception, perspective, and space. After a painful breakup with his longtime partner, Peter Schlesinger, Hockney made a series of etchings based on Wallace Steven’s poem, “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” which was in turn based on Pablo Picasso’s famous 1903-04 Blue-period painting, “The Old Guitarist.” Hockney was drawn to the poet’s insistence on “things exactly as they are,” using his etchings to play with realistic and illusionistic depictions of space, all within the emotional frame of the artist’s life and relationships with others.
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