SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

Off The Black is Nick Nolte playing an ailing umpire who recruits a pitcher in his league to accompany him to his first high school reunion in decades.  This is a whisper of a picture and moving, sleepy, drifting.  I wonder sometimes about minor key movements when one must spend years making a film, which is why painting is so fast and furious in comparison.  Painting is a silent sport but can be noisy in the paintbrush, and I can achieve a painting in solitary over the course of two or two hundred hours.  Each painting of the 850 I’ve made is a stitch in the fabric that I spin from nothing or from everything in life for that matter.  Reading my first journals this week on painting from 1994 one needs a fist full of courage and perhaps a little stupidity to enter into such a grueling game.  On the other side however, if one can make a living at it, which is rare, the dance gets sweeter and the artist gets to play as opposed to subjecting himself to constant torture on the canvas.  All art forms are the same in this way, although the collaborative aspects of film, dance, music, theater, make the thought of a strong cohesive vision all the more daunting to the solitary creator… painter or writer or solo musical prodigy.

Todd Fields, one of my favs after his very powerful ‘In the Bedroom’, directs this strange and at times moving picture.  The whole film plays like a setup and this is why I never quite trusted it.  The direction shots trend superb, the omniscient narrative overlay is intriguing.  The characters are all molded to fit an idea, and this struck me sourly.  This is a film about how people can falter, how they can be weak, how weakness is exploited, or is this what it means to be alive?  Mr. Fields has a way of intimacy in the face of impending doom about him, which is not to say the film is a tragedy.  This director explores perception and nuance in an important way, although the bedrock characters are gone from this film, which made ‘In The Bedroom’ such a resonant marriage of material and director.  Mr. Fields makes music when he trusts his characters, even if they don’t trust themselves.

Brick is a sleeper from 2005 I want to say, a high school whodunnit which reads like Chandler’s The Big Sleep.  At first I was annoyed then engaged as this is a smart, small film for the indie inclines…

Anna Holtz becomes Beethoven’s copyist and inspiration in this fictional yet remarkably inspiring movie.  There is a scene where Beethoven first presents his legendary 9th to all Vienna and Anna sits in the orchestra, keeping time for the deaf Beethoven as he conducts.  This is one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen in film.  History determines that Beethoven was on the podium yet as a result of deafness not conducting, although some elements like his being turned to face an uproar of applause is fact based. 

This film beats the hell out of Gary Oldman’s Beethoven.  Ed Harris, who succeeded brilliantly in his pet project Pollock, is a thrill to watch as the tempest conductor fighting for his life and art.  The relationship between Anna Holtz and Beethoven is masterfully written, directed and acted even if it’s pure fiction.

 There are few films that capture the creative flame like this one.  There’s A Portrait of Jenny from 1936(?), Guinness’s hysterical The Horse’s Mouth of 1966, Basquait was a good one although thin, the Warhol movies are alright but superficial like he was, Girl With a Pearl Earing is a really moody, pretty picture, Pollock was very good, Hopkins’ Picasso was okay, Mozart is a superior film, Frida is one of the best, there are a spate of writer films which don’t translate as well as painter and musician films, although Ed Harris again makes a great Winter Passing and the recent Factotum was seedily enjoyable (Matt Dylan plays Bukowski, Lili Taylor from I shot Andy Warhol excellence his occasional love interest).  There is the accomplishment of the Ninth that I paint to, which has brought tears to my eyes for now years, some of my strongest works were painted to listening to this symphony, and so I’m biased.  But as one of the strongest creative achievements in history, this story of the Ninth is about all in creativity, and as an all in creator who has sacrificed many things for art I will return to this film.

Stranger Than Fiction is an amusing and sweet film, Will Farrell the filling between sweet Maggie Gyllenthal and emotional Emma Thompson.  Dustin Hoffman plays the literary detective of sorts and in one scene a cloying omniscient cosmic narrator that reminded me of annoying Dustin Hoffman moments not necessary to his disheveled, quirky character.

Mr. Farrell Plays Harold Crick, a man of precision and boredom.  One day he hears a voice while a famous author is composing her decade long new book; could the two be related?  In the process of Mr. Crick’s self-discovery his nemesis turns curly in the ovens of Ms. Gyllenthal’s commanding if occasionally over the top feminity, if such a thing is possible.  I recently saw Ms. Gyllenthal in Sherry Baby, a dark film about her character’s return to a life she left behind when in prison.  Ms. Gyllenthal is a thoroughly absorbing actress, a physical presence, a pretty Olive Oil with a brain somehow, her lanky frame angling at all the sweet features that I find so intriguing about the drawn or painted figure, the lines I go for in art.  Will Farrell is fun to watch when he’s a smart dud… characters with quirky brains work better for me on Mr. Farrell because he can pull off scenes like this, when Mr Hoffman asks: Do you feel like parts of you are from somewhere else?  And Mr. Farrell replies, “Do you mean, like my arms?”  Emma Thompson plays more neurotic than I enjoy her wise, fluid spirit, but she satisfies her role as a torn up writer. 

The film is light enough that it must be pinned down into memory lest it fly away, but I enjoyed it strangely like I enjoyed Sandler and Emily Watson’s punch drunk love; Stranger than Fiction is the better film perhaps, certainly more mass appealing, but two simple love stories with neurotic, complex characters facing situations they never asked for in the first place.