SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

After the Wedding is one of the best films of the decade for its fierce slant on loyalty, family, personal history, the goodness that can be brought out in people during tremendous hardship.  This Danish movie Hollywood does not know how to make.  After The Wedding contains deep hope and pain in the same passages, in the same timespace.  The stakes are so high in this story that it could have been a campy disaster, but director Susanne Bier  has great vision.  The acting is brilliant, the writing is superb, the experience is unforgettable, a remarkable cinematic achievement.

This Academy award picture, Best Foreign Film 2006.  This film slid by me and is perhaps more powerful for it the way great pictures resonate with time as a second thought, a frightening glimpse of East Germany’s recent past.  A by-the-book Stasi agent, highly regarded for his unparalleled interrogation skills, wears confessions out of his victims by night and teaches his tactics as though his methods are an art form by day.  Ironically he is soon charged to test his art form on one of Berlin’s famous creative couples, a playright and his actress girlfriend.  As secrets of their lives are revealed through all the bugs in their walls the unshakable Stasi agent begins to explore his own deeply locked emotions… is it the art of others which might unlock compassion in this steely faced pawn of the brutal Berlin regime?  This is a moving film about what life is like in autocratic regimes, and it reminds me to ask questions about the alarming steps our government has taken against its citizens under the auspices of a ‘war on terror’.  I waved this banner feverishly until I started looking deeply at our government and the hundred bullet points that make clear the American citizen was not told the full truth about 911.

Based on the best-selling novel “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”, this film follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille as his talent for scent in 18th century Paris leads him down deep psychological corridors to bottle the ephemeral.  Narrated at a deliciously measured pace by John Hurt, directed with macabre excellence by Tom Tykwer, this 2006 work belongs in 2006 top ten.  It has a great story line, murder, mystery, magic, humor, a cautionary tale and a paradoxical dark peek into the heart of an artist completely overrun by his genius in a craft.  This film is not for the faint of heart… wits with black humor and strong stomachs veering campy will enjoy the intelligence and see past the ugly…

Edie Sedgwick is a sad story about the weird Warhol thing, which continues to dominate the art arena as his paintings and work fetch high prices.  The film is good, Sienna is excellent, Guy Pierce plays an excellent Warhol, Hayden Christianson plays an excellent Dylan, which surprises as I’m not a fan of this actor.  His role here feels like Sandra Bullock’s excellent role as Harper Lee in the Capote film Infamous; never a fan of either they both fall into their characters and I forget who the actors are.  I’ve never been inspired by the shelf life of Warhol.  He is important but his work comes off like big hair bands to me… he reads like a stage prop.  The Factory is exposed for what it is, and you get it or you don’t.  I’m not much of a glam fan so I don’t care about The Factory much, I feel like Dylan talks when he refers flippantly to painted Brillo Boxes.  The film is very depressing and I have trouble sympathizing with characters bent on self-destruction.  This is so BORING, as the Sedgwick character would have said early in her experiences at the Factory.  But the film has it’s star appeal and although I don’t care to play I’ll take a look from the sidelines, mainly at how thin a living this existence comes off in its lack of resonance… Warhol in all his media wisdom dates himself and never thinks of resonance, which is more my cup of tea.  A lot of old art is steaming hot today and I see Warhol’s work as a time capsule like his time capsule boxes… iconic of an age, prescient in their delivery, execution and promotion, and stale.  Warhol in terms of timelessness never thought outside of the box.

This film is a terribly sad yet moving portrait of Edith Piaf, a French treasure in song.  The movie starts with old Piaf then traces her life with varying degrees of success.  The acting is brilliant, yet I wonder about the editing.  As with other biographies I see the old and young intermingled, but Ms. Piaf’s fall is so short in her 40’s, looking like an eighty year old, that I would rather have seen a chronological narrative.  I’m not sure if this would have been more powerful but this is my gut.  The movie drags with the back and forth, gets strange in some places with these switchbacks but I get the point and I appreciate the work.  I come away with a new inspiration and this is all that’s important in the end, a new idol presented to me, born the year of my grandparents, who moves me to look back on my twentieth century and what a solitary voice can do for the people who live in it.  I remain steadfast on ‘Copying Beethoven’, which is one of the best films about creators I’ve seen and rings in my ears.  I don’t feel the resonance with this one, but looking hard at a creative life meant to soar and undone early is a slow untethering that troubles the mind, the years slipping by as talent is tossed needlessly away.  There are no second and third acts in this film which although very Hollywood resuscitate a tired audience… there is simply the spiral into early old age, and as there seems to be no thought to the contrary I’m inclined to believe that the director and writer were true to life as much as possible.