Peter Schilling Here’s a great night out: dinner, drinks perhaps, and then Amir Bar-Lev’s fascinating documentary My Kid Could Paint That (opening tomorrow at the Lagoon Cinema.) The story of four-year-old Marla Olmstead, the little girl who made abstract paintings that sold for nearly a half million dollars, My Kid will have you and your cohorts debating … Read more
The Guardian Unlimited film blogs are hailing this as the greatest YouTube clip of all time. I don’t know about that, but it is fecking cool: counting down from 100 using classic movie clips. How many can you name?
“ … Sure, it’s all there, but it’s kind of a tease. We’re definitely guilty of teasing.” —Joel Coen, on Barton Fink If you’ve visited the website for No Country for Old Men (opening November 9), you might have read the claim that the Coen brothers’ newest film “strips down the American crime drama and … Read more
Monty Python’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age; The Darjeeling Limited, and Michael Clayton. One should never glean one’s history from the movies. Not knowing the least bit about the age of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen of England, I can still tell you that Elizabeth: The Golden Age is about as true to the facts as any … Read more
Brand Upon the Brain!. Now showing exclusively at The Parkway Theater. You might find this strange, but here goes: I often wonder if cinema was ruined with sound. That the noise and the clatter wrecked an image that so subtly tapped into your subconscious, made you dream differently, hell, even live differently. Have you ever … Read more
Conservationist Ted Williams (the writer, not the frozen ballplayer) argues that the wanton planting of trees by short-sighted environmental groups (like the Arbor Day Foundation) are actually hurting the planet. (Though the link is to his blog, the article originally appeared in the “Incite” section of the always thought-provoking Audubon Magazine).
Movie musicals–I love ’em. This magical celluloid hybrid of dancing, singing, acting, and (very importantly) cinematography simply amazes me. If Broadway’s your bag, that’s wonderful, but I’ll take cinema’s version any day: on stage, it would impossible to track Gene Kelly as he splashes through the Hollywood streets in that iconic scene in Singin’ in … Read more
Ken Burns’ The War launched last evening. It was virtually impossible not to know this, as it had been advertised almost literally everywhere, and if you have any interest in anything that public radio or television broadcasts, you’ll have heard or seen tons of ads already. As usual, Burns is exceedingly earnest, and, as usual, … Read more
On a perfectly sunny day for a baseball game, as thousands of fans swarmed to the dust heap that is to be the future home of the new Twins Stadium, a good half-mile away a small but dedicated group of curmudgeons gathered outside Cuzzy’s Bar on Washington Avenue. They were preparing for their own little … Read more
In 2004, director Amir Bar-Lev first approached the parents of young Marla Olmstead with the idea of making a documentary of her extraordinary talent. Over the course of a year, this four-year-old girl from Binghamton, New York, sold nearly $300,000 worth of abstract paintings, was covered by news outlets from around the world, and then, … Read more