Julia Roberts in a psychological thriller: what could be better? I approve of Julia Roberts in just about anything else. But in AFTER THE HUNT she is wasted, as is the viewer's time. BBC called it "more of an admirable project than an engaging drama. " And that is being kind. Roberts plays a professor of philosophy, at Yale, on the edge of receiving tenure. The stakes are rather low for something marketed as a "thriller": will a #MeToo scandal keep her outside of the magic threshold of academic tenure? I'll spoil it for you (no harm done, I assure you!), the answer is "yes," at least for a period of five years. The implication of the final scene -- a flash-forward -- seems to be that her character, Alma, has recovered her upward path five years after the events displayed in the main narrative line. Back to the mainline. The harassment scandal involves Alma's Platonic but flirtatious man friend, Hank, who is also a candidate for tenure...
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There is a television commercial in regular rotation these days that bugs me. (That is usually the case, but let me vent a bit about the latest example). A woman is talking into her cell phone while standing in front of a wall of paintings. Some of the paintings are kitschy, some are rather surrealist so far as we can tell at our quick glance. NONE of them is abstract. Woman says, "I just love abstract art. I don't understand it, but I love it." Huh? Can someone explain this to me? I neither love this scene nor understand it. Are we supposed to regard the art behind her as her collection, which she has amassed because of this love? Or is she at a museum, and the title she gives this art is due to the curators? Were the set designers for this shot too lazy to find anything at all abstract? Or is the mismatch between words and background somehow the point of the scene? I am agog. The above image, BTW, is abstract a...
I recently watched the movie Mr. Turner , a biopic of the life of J.M.W. Turner, the great landscape/seascape painter. I had heard good things about the movie, but somehow I had gotten the impression that John Ruskin had a larger role in it than, it turns out, he had. I tend to think of Ruskin (whose image you see here) as the Clement Greenberg to Turner's Jackson Pollock. As regular readers of this blog will remember, I have commented on their relationship here of late. Pollock's painting, combined with Greenberg's interpretation, created the New York centered modernism of the late 1940s. Likewise, Turner's painting, combined with Ruskin's interpretation, recreated the too-familiar genre of landscape painting, in the process giving British art in the 1830s and early '40s a sound push in the direction of the somewhat later pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I still may amuse myself with that analogy, but it receives precious little support from this movie. Rusk...
Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), although an art critic , not an artist, is to me the most fascinating figure in 20th century U.S. art history. He first made a splash with the essay " Avant-Garde and Kitsch ," published in the Partisan Review in 1939. Here, BTW, is a link to a discussion of the history of the PR. But I'm more interested in that word "kitsch." Nowadays it has a somewhat more favorable, or at least a less unfavorable, meaning than Greenberg meant to give it , in appropriating the German word for tacky. Greenberg would dislike the note of sentimental indulgence that has crept into some usages of the word. He wrote, "Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their ti...
My recent movie-going experiences include The Longest Ride, an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. I'm not going to talk about the plot, especially, so there's no need for a "spoiler alert." This post concerns a secondary theme of the movie by which I was struck. A little information about structure and cast will get us there. There are two stories, one framing the other, The frame involves a pair of young lovers, rodeo star Luke Collins (played by Scott Eastwood, Clint's boy) and aspiring art curator Sophia Danko (Britt Robertson). Their story is not especially interesting except that it provides a frame for a better love story. Luke and Sophia become involved in the life of an old man, Ira Levinson. Ira as the old guy is played by Alan Alda, though Ira as a young man (in flashbacks triggered by readings of old letters) is played by Jack Huston. Young Ira's beloved, starting in 1940, is a refugee from Austria, Ruth Pfeffer (Oona Chaplin). As I...