Today I went to see The Business of Strangers and Pollock with my sister. Both movies were good, but we agreed that Strangers was the better of the two and that it was actually a quite impressive movie. It stars Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles and besides a guy they met in a bar they’re pretty much the only people with lines in this movie. It’s filmed in a lot of neutral locations (hotels, airports, a company meeting room and so on) and could just as easily have worked as a play. The movie focuses on the relationship between the two women and is both funny and engaging the whole way through. Channing is pretty incredible in this movie and Stiles is also very believable. The plot is interesting enough that you’re hanging in there to see where it’ll take the characters. But the real strength of the movie lies in the dialogue between the two women. They’re constantly trying to figure out the other one’s strengths and weaknesses and at the same time their actions are reflections of their own strengths and weaknesses. They’re two interesting people and although they do some pretty disturbing things you’re not repelled by them, but rather getting still more interested in why they act like they do.

After that we saw Pollock, which started out good, but couldn’t sustain the intensity and got a bit meaningless towards the end. The movie begins with Pollock signing autographs in 1950 and then it goes back to 1941, when he was a struggling artist living in his brother’s apartment. Pollock was a real man’s man. He listened to jazz, smoked like a fish and drank like a chimney, and made sure to repress all his emotions until he snapped like a twig. But since he managed to stay out of the loony bin long enough to become a successful painter this only makes his life story more interesting. The problem is that after about an hour and ten minutes we’re back to 1950 and from then on Pollock’s life deteriorates until his untimely death in 1956. This part of the movie isn’t nearly as interesting as his development as an artist and his transformation into a respected painter. So the movie falls flat towards the end, which is a shame because for the most part the movie was actually pretty good. Ed Harris gives his all in the portrayal of the alcoholic and deeply troubled painter and Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden is perfect as his wife Lee Krasner, who tries to help him and supports him unconditionally.

After the movies we went for pizza and had a loud discussion in the pizza place about the merits of abstract art. My sister likes his work and the work of other abstract artists and claims that she gets something from looking at it. In the movie Pollock says that his art doesn’t have a message. It’s like looking at a meadow and asking what message does the meadow have. You should just look at it and enjoy it. I can appreciate that, but when I look at abstract art I just see colours and I can’t recall ever getting something from it other than being amazed at their technique. I like Pop Art, because I understand the language they’re painted in. I understand the choice of objects and fascination with brand names and consumer culture. I mean I like people like Francis Bacon, Magritte, and Dali, but generally I just like Pop. Everything else I just look at and then judge it based on whether I get fascinated by it or not. But it rarely affects me on a deeper level, because I don’t get it.

I just realized that there hasn’t been made a movie about Salvador Dali and that’s actually a bit strange. There are movies about Bacon, Warhol, Basquiat, Van Gogh, Goya, Picasso, Pollock, and probably a lot of others that I haven’t seen. You’d think with the crazy life Dali had someone would be dying to make a movie about him. Someone probably will someday though.

On an unrelated note I just remembered that a friend of mine recently found a song he’d been trying to find for almost 20 years. Tonight I found a song that I have been trying to find for a couple of months. It’s not quite the same, but it was still nice to get that of my mind. The song is Summer Sun by Koop and I actually found it, because I was reading an article over at Parallax View. So once again thanks goes out to Dead Kenny.

I had to change the archives today, because some of the posts were missing. I guess there’s a limit to the length of the main page, so quite a few dates had gotten cut of. But that should be fixed now.

I totally forgot that I'd been to see The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and The Royal Tenenbaums last night. It's gotten really late now, so I won't go into details, but I thought both movies were really funny. Scorpion was very much like an old fashioned slapstick comedy and Tenenbaums was just so bizarre that we laughed through the whole movie. They were both very good and I'm looking forward to seeing Tenenbaums again, because the first half hour was just so packed with jokes and information about the characters I'm sure I missed some stuff.