Movie Monday: We Bought A Zoo

This week's movie is the 2011 family dramedy We Bought A Zoo!

Straight up, the only reason I was interested in this film was because of the director, Cameron Crowe. His film Jerry Maguire holds the record for the most times I've seen a film in the theater (ten), and I've loved/liked much of his previous work (Say Anything, Singles, Almost Famous). So while this film, from the trailers, looked like a bland family comedy/drama, I figured Crowe's participation demanded I give it a look.

The film opens during what is obviously a typically harried morning routine with reporter and all-around thrill-seeker Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) as he tries to get his two children, Dylan and Rosie, ready for school. Mee's wife passed away unexpectedly just a few months previous, so the family is still raw.

On the way to school, it's established Dylan is getting into a lot of trouble, and Matt just doesn't have the time to deal with it:

After Dylan is expelled from school after a series of behavioral transgressions, Mee (who has quit his job as a reporter, in a brief scene featuring the great Peter Reigert as his boss) decides to find the family a new house, wanting a fresh start for all concerned.

He ends up finding the perfect house...tons of space, sunshine, and scenic views. Just one problem: it comes with a zoo. And not just a zoo, but a dilapidated, failing zoo, full of wild animals and twitchy staff, led by Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson):

Mee doesn't know anything about zoos, or animals for that matter, but he believes in this new adventure, and plows ahead, spending lots and lots of money (which he has, courtesy of an inheritance, something he shares with his brother, played by Thomas Haden Church). The place needs all manner of repairs, and the animals are of course difficult to deal with, none more so than Scar, an elderly tiger who requires lots of complicated care.

Even more difficult to deal with is a government inspector who comes to make sure the animals are treated properly and the zoo is following regulations. As played by David Michael Higgins, this character seems to be coming from an entirely different, more cartoony, movie:

While Mee's daughter loves the zoo, the son does not. He remains gloomy and sullen, rejecting the good-natured advances of a girl his own age he meets there, and always pining to return to their original home.

When Dylan overhears his father talking to Kelly about him, it explodes into an argument, where father and son finally have it out:

Mee runs out of money to fix the zoo, until a bundle of unexpected cash falls into his lap, thanks to someone from the past. This convinces him to stick with it, and gear up for the zoo's opening day. After some more setbacks, and a thunderous, unusual rainstorm, Mee and his crew get everything ready.

On opening day, the sun is shining, and we see that the new, refurbished zoo will be a success:

We Bought A Zoo is one of those films that has a number of things "wrong" with it, but the whole enterprise is so straightforward and good-natured that you feel like a major league grump complaining about it. The story (based on real life events) is so simplistic and cheesy that this could have been an ABC Family Channel movie, save for the A-list talent involved (and on the soundtrack, more on that in a moment).

Everything here is so bland (except for the scene with Damon and Colin Ford, which has a real angry edge to it) that I kept thinking there was going to be some sort of dramatic, or at the very least idiosyncratic, flourish, something present in almost all of Crowe's films (I say almost because I have not seen the notorious Elizabethtown). I kept having to remind myself that he actually directed this, and not some journeyman TV movie director who grinds out Lifetime movies. After something like the third cutaway of the little girl adorably squealing "We bought a zoo!" to no one in particular, I wondered how much my sugar levels had risen while watching it.

The one area where Crowe is heavily present, and not in a good way, is on the soundtrack. Crowe's background in music is deep and well-known, and the soundtracks to his films are usually excellent. But in Zoo, I kept hearing so many songs by huge names (Tom Petty, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens) that it felt like Crowe was using them simply because he has personal access to people like Petty, Young, Dylan, etc.

Don't get me wrong--I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan and am always happy to hear his songs in a movie (especially when its an unusual one, like "Buckets of Rain", heard in Zoo), but they seemed very out of place here. Most of the time I couldn't fathom what they had to do with any given scene, or the characters. I hate to say this, but it kinda felt like the soundtrack is what someone Crowe's age would consider hip, when to most of the characters in the movie, these songs would be relegated to an oldies station (even more cringe-worthy was a scene where, ahem, Dylan, and the young farm girl played by Elle Fanning talk about Bob Dylan, as if either of them would have any clue who he is, or care. They must have have been gone to that school from Dangerous Minds).

Okay, that said, I still stand by what I stated above: We Bought A Zoo is such a nice movie, and tells such an affirming, sweet story, that simply pointing out all its flaws seems like an exercise in internet douchebaggery, and we have enough of that, thank you very much. Rated PG, full of cute animals and containing some solid performances, its ideal for family viewing. And considering how much garbage is marketed to kids as "family entertainment", you could do a lot worse than We Bought A Zoo.

Movie Monday: The Descendants

This week's movie is the 2011 drama The Descendants!

Like Drive and The Ides of March, Alexander Payne's The Descendants was a movie in 2011 I wanted to see but never got around to catching in the theaters. I've liked every film Payne has directed, and I like George Clooney, so...

The film opens with dialogue-free scene of a woman enjoying herself, clearly on a boat, with the sun shining and the wind in her hair. After that scene fades to black, we learn who that was: Elizabeth King, wife of Matt King (Clooney), who has had a very serious accident while boating. So bad, in fact, that she is now in a coma, clinging to life as her husband watches over her.

Matt King is a successful attorney, and also the controlling interest of a trust that has been handed down through his family over the years, stretching all the way back to the very beginnings of Hawaii as we know it. He has two daughters, the younger of which lives at home, with the older away at school on another island.

Matt holds on to the belief that his wife will wake up, but early on a family doctor has to tell him the terrible news: that Elizabeth's brain is so damaged that she is essentially dead already, being kept alive only by machines. As the doctor continues to talk, the full impact of this hits Matt:

Matt and his younger daughter Scottie go to retrieve Alexandra, who apparently has been getting into trouble when she was home with the family. Matt, who by his own admission has been the back-up parent, is flummoxed on how to handle Scottie, who seems to be following in her big sister's footsteps.

Turning to Alexandra for help, Matt and his daughter butt heads repeatedly, until finally the truth comes out: Elizabeth, at the time of her accident, was having an affair:

Matt is, of course, overwhelmed at this news. He confronts some friends, who knew about the affair. He goes back and forth with his daughter, trying to process what he's heard, while having to break the news about his wife to their friends, and his in-laws, one of whom is played by the great Robert Forster:

Forster plays Elizabeth's father as a stern, harsh man, who doesn't have much nice to say about Matt or his granddaughters. But he has his own titanic personal issues to deal with, and when he gets so mad that he punches someone, its one of the film's few big laughs.

Matt decides he wants to learn more about the man his wife was having an affair with, a local realtor. Under the guise of a short vacation, he takes his daughters (plus Alexandra's seemingly dim-witted sort-of boyfriend) to one of the other islands, where they take a trip to the vast piece of pristine, ocean-front property Matt and his family are the owners of:

Matt visits a relative (played by Beau Bridges), who is very interested in selling the property to a local developer. Matt has always lived off the money he made as an attorney, never touching his inheritance, so he is not as bullish about selling. But other members of his family, who are not so well-off, are, and they are urging Matt to sell and make everyone vastly wealthy.

Matt, with the help of Alexandra, do some detective work and find their mystery man, who also has a seemingly happy family:

Matt confronts the man, generously giving him the chance to say goodbye to Elizabeth. The man's wife (played by Judy Greer, above), seems none the wiser.

After saying one last goodbye to his wife, Matt attends a family meeting where it has been all-but-decided that the right thing to do is sign on the proverbial dotted line:

I'm not going to say anymore about The Descendants (perhaps I've already said too much), other than I thoroughly enjoyed the film. The two main leads, George Clooney and Shailene Woodley (as Alexandra), are both excellent, and have a real chemistry, a believable rapport as father and estranged daughter. They spar a lot throughout the movie, so when Alexandra pipes up to defend her father against unfair criticism, it packs a real emotional punch.

The film delves a bit into island history, and why whatever Matt's decision is about selling the land is so important. Hawaii is, as always, gorgeous to look at, and while Matt King (via some voice over that disappears 1/3rd into the film) scoffs at the cliche that living in Hawaii is paradise, The Descendants really does make it look like anyone's particular cross would be a bit easier to bear in a place like this.

The Descendants ends with a long, drawn out, virtually silent scene, and while I won't say what it is (not that it's some big twist), I will say it seems to put a firm point at the end of the sentence, giving you a clear indication where the King family is going once the credits are over.

The trailers for the movie made it look like it was much more of a comedy than it really is, I guess that's par for the course with movie marketing. Overall, The Descendants has a lot less laughs than Payne's previous films like Sideways, Election, and About Schmidt, but I still found myself engrossed in the story from beginning to end.

Movie Monday: Humanoids From The Deep

This week's movie is the 1980 horror cheapie Humanoids From The Deep!

Okay, this one I guarantee does not feature Ryan Gosling!

Humanoids From The Deep (aka Monster, which you see on the above poster; it was too good not to use for this post) is a film from the tight-fisted hands of producer Roger Corman, and stars Doug McClure, Ann Turkel, Vic Morrow, and a lot of topless girls.

The plot (such as it is) is about as close as you could come to recycling an older screenplay and just replacing the names (a lot harder to do in those pre-desktop publishing days). In the small town of Noyo--which is downstream from a chemical plant (ooh, social commentary!) run by the conglomerate known as Canco--some fisherman go trawling, and in one of their nets they catch some sort of giant sea monster.

The creature, which has razor-sharp claws, thrashes at the net and eventually in the young son of one of the fishermen, who has accidentally spilled gasoline on the deck. When another crewman lights a flare, it sets off an explosion, somehow causing it to turn from day to night, and back again:

One of the "notable" things I learned about this movie as I settled down to watch it was the fact that the monsters not only kill and mutilate their victims, but they actually take time to rape the human women they find. As if that wasn't enough of an odd detail, Humanoids of the Deep was actually directed by a woman, Barbara Peeters--but more on that in a moment.

Anyway, knowing that this film contained scenes like that, I was at least prepared. So I pleasantly surprised when, after one of creatures attacks a young couple on the beach, the film cuts away just as the girl is about to get it (the young man having been torn up and left for dead). I thought, oh, okay, the real nasty stuff won't be shown, it'll just be implied. Then, after a couple of dull talky scenes, the movie makes the effort to cut back to just the rape sequence:

Luckily, we don't really see anything, other than the girl's top get torn off. It's kind of disturbing to think that the producers thought the nudity would still be titillating, coming as it does in the middle of a rape scene. Best not to dwell on that, I guess.

Anyway, the scenes taking place back in the town are pretty standard. Vic Morrow, playing "Hank Slattery" (who I believe had his own detective show in the 80s, right after Matt Houston) seems to channeling his racist character from The Twilight Zone movie, spewing some off-handed racist stuff about someone hiring a "minority lawyer" from "the big city." Horrors!

While all the main characters yak, the Humanoids are running rampant on the edges of town, killing and raping, raping and killing. They attack a couple about to get it on in a tent on the beach, where the young man in question has decided to bring his ventriloquist dummy:

In the movie's most far-fetched moment, the use of ventriloquism actually gets the girl to take off her clothes, as opposed to shrieking from the tent in terror. Sadly, this scene ends like the previous one did: the guy gets it (yay!), the girl gets raped. Ugh.

The film's main characters are, ostensibly, Ann Turkel as a concerned scientist(!), and Doug McClure as a local resident who believes Turkel when she discovers what Canco's chemicals hath wrought. There's a go-for-broke scene of a bunch of Humanoids attacking people in broad daylight, and McClure opens up and fires:

If you squint hard, you can picture the great Tom Atkins in this role. I guess he was busy with The Fog. Oh well.

Anyway, the humanoids keep rampaging, finally attacking the town during it's big yearly carnival, resulting in more killing and raping (the women character's clothes in this movie fall off easier than they did in Zapped). McClure's character sets fire to the bay, cutting the Humanoids' ability to retreat. Stranded, each of the monsters are in turn shot, stabbed, or beaten to death. The next day, everything is back to normal. Or is it?

Well, not quite: one of the women attacked, Peggy, gives birth, and...

Humanoids From The Deep 2: Baby Geniuses!

Of course, Humanoids of the Deep is grade-Z trash, given whatever minor respectability (if that's even the right word to use) it has by the presence of it's B-level cast and some attempt at cool monster effects, like what you're wincing at above.

The thing that makes the film distinctive is the level of gruesomeness it achieves in regards to the monsters' attack. The whole "female victim" undercurrent of monster movies goes all the way back to King Kong (and probably even before), but rarely had a horror movie been this explicit, both visually and textually.

Stories differ, but supposedly producer Corman thought the film needed more sex and violence. When director Peeters refused to shoot such footage, he had a second unit director (Jimmy Murakami, whose career is all over the place) do it, resulting in the finished film. And while one can admire Peeters for not wanting to be involved in such lurid details, I'm at a loss to imagine what this movie would have been without the sex and violence--a bunch of dull, talky scenes peppered by the brief appearance of some guys in drippy rubber suits.

Improbably, Humanoids From The Deep was remade for cable in 1996, with (from what I've read), the sex and violence toned down. I can only imagine a big-budget "re-imagining" is just around the corner!

Movie Monday: The Ides of March

This week's movie is the 2011 political drama/thriller The Ides of March!

I'm an unabashed fan of George Clooney; I think the guy does great work (post-Batman & Robin, of course) and while I don't think all of his films are director are successful, they've all been interesting and different from one another that a Clooney-directed political thriller was on top of my rental list:

Pre-credits, the film opens with whiz-kid political consultant Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling--what, him again?) doing some prep work at political debate. The stage is quiet and dark, and Meyers assumes the role of candidate, saying some of the things we'll hear come out of someone else's mouth later on.

The film's basic story is set up rather gracefully; over a long shot of TV talking heads, newspaper clippings, and other magazine covers, we learn that liberal Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney) is in a dead heat against another Democrat in a primary fight for Ohio. The polls say things are neck-and-neck, and we hear real-life news commentators like Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews talk about the race:

We meet the various members of Morris' staff, like his rumpled right hand man, Paul Zara (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, born to play parts like this), and a comely campaign volunteer named Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), who we see clearly has a thing for Meyers:

Zara and Meyers parry with their rival campaign manager, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), and they're both after the endorsement of a Blue Dog Democrat named Thompson (Jeffrey Wright). At one point, Duffy calls Meyers and asks him to meet in secret. That is considered verboten in situations like this, but Duffy is persuasive and Meyers agrees.

Duffy asks Meyers to quit Morris' campaign and come work for them. Meyers is flabbergasted, and says he works for Morris because he believes in his platform. Their meeting ends with Meyers taking in Duffy's dire warning that Morris can't win.

It only takes a few hours, but news of the meeting gets leaked to the press (represented by a NYT reporter played by Marisa Tomei, looking tired and unglamorous), and Meyers has to fess up to his boss what he did:

Zara is aghast, accuses Meyers of being disloyal, the single worst trait in situations like this.

Meanwhile, Meyers and Molly take their relationship further, they spend the night together with a shaky promise from Meyers that this wasn't just a one-night stand. Later on, they sleep together again, and Meyers discovers something shocking about her that shakes his entire view of Gov. Morris.

After some more dramatic developments, Meyers, feeling hurt and betrayed, arranges a private meeting with Morris. To this point, The Ides of March was less a thriller than a high-wire drama, but Clooney shoots the face-off between Meyers and Morris like something really, really bad is about to happen:

Unfortunately, it's here that The Ides of March really goes off the rails. Gosling's character goes so rogue that it seems unbelievable that the other characters in the movie go along with him; to me what had been a well-acted, well-staged political thriller just becomes ridiculous. The characters take such huge risks that, while I'm sure they could really happen (see: Game Change), it just feels wildly implausible. Also, after a certain point we're left with no characters to root for--wow, so everyone we're watching is loathsome? Politicians and their handlers can be loathsome? Stop the presses!

The movie ends fairly abruptly, again on Meyers' face, this time all the humanity has been stripped away. Meyers is successful, but at what cost?


As I said above, The Ides of March is 2/3rds a good movie. The performances are all solid (to be expected, when you've got people like Clooney, Hoffman, Giamatti, and Wright in it), and Clooney does a solid job as director, keeping the story moving briskly while never losing his eye for character detail.

But when the mechanics of the thriller plot kick in, everyone starts behaving in ways so preposterous that I just sort of rolled my eyes that all this good stuff had been chucked away for the sake a juicy twist. At the final third, The Ides of March is barely less contrived than one of those straight-to-DVD thrillers that used to fill video store shelves. Which is too bad; there's so much talent here that it feels like a giant wasted opportunity.


Hey, I just realized, two Ryan Gosling movies in a row? We'll tackle something totally different next week, I promise!

Movie Monday: Drive

This week's movie is the 2011 action/thriller Drive!

I really wanted to see Drive when it came out last year, partly because I had read it was a really solid, no-frills genre film, something many filmmakers attempt but can't quite pull off (see: Planet Terror, Hobo with A Shotgun), and partly because it featured one of my all-time favorites, Albert Brooks, in a very atypical role. I was sold.

But I didn't get around to Drive at the time, so as soon as it hit video I corrected that mistake:

Drive opens with a nearly-wordless, bravura pre-credits sequence of "Driver" (Ryan Gosling) talking to a potential client, and dictating the terms of his employ: for five minutes, he will do everything he can to get his client out of trouble. Anything before or after that five minutes it not his concern.

Then we see Driver do just that, helping two masked gunmen escape the police via a combo of near-genius driving skills and steely nerves. After safely delivering his clients, Driver dons a ball cap, leaves his car, and disappears into the crowd, walking right by the very police looking for him.

Back at home, he runs into his neighbor, a single mother named Irene (Carey Mulligan). It doesn't take too long to see Irene is none too steady, and that Driver likes her and her son. He runs into her again at a convenience store and he helps her bring her groceries home:

Driver's day job is as a stunt driver for Hollywood, and his mentor is some sort of auto mechanical wizard named Shannon (Bryan Cranston). After we watch Driver at work, Shannon introduces him to a friend, an imposing figure named Bernie...improbably played by Albert Brooks:

Bernie wants to hire Driver to to run an auto race, but that's just the beginning of their involvement. At this point I will say no more about the plot, and just give you a general impression of the film as a whole.

I liked Driver. A lot. With its quasi-80s fashions and theme music, the film is consciously replicating the gritty urban thrillers of the 80s, like Thief and To Live and Die in L.A. (not to mention 1978's The Driver, which also features a nameless lead character). Yet it veers into territory those films did not: it has some downright "arty" sequences, as if someone made a drive-in art house film. Also, the violence at times is extreme in its in-your-face goriness: at one point Driver attacks someone and, after clearly knocking them out, continues to kick their head into literally a bloody pulp.

Going into this movie, I was unconvinced that the baby-faced Gosling could really pull off a role this bad-ass. And while he does look too small and boyish to be such a shark, there are moments where I thought Gosling made that work for him--like Driver is only pretending to be this hardcore, and uses extreme violence to cover it up. There's a touch of that in a scene set in the backroom of a strip club, where Driver threatens to hammer a nail into the head of low level mob guy, much to the indifference of the surrounding strippers:

Mad Men's Christina Hendricks shows up, briefly, looking less glammed up but still stunningly beautiful; someone needs to get her into another crime thriller stat; she looks like the classic Movie Gun Moll. Hellboy's Ron Perlman also appears, and Albert Brooks--still recognizably the mordant, whip-smart funny guy--completely pulls off his role as a mid-tier mob guy; there's a scene where he commits an act of violence so grisly I genuinely gasped when it happened. How can this be the same nebbish from Modern Problems and Lost in America?

The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, has claimed Halloween as an inspiration for this film. For most of the movie, it's hard to see how, until Driver nicks a high-end movie prop mask and stalks one of his enemies, looking genuinely creepy, aka Michael Myers:

Driver has a final confrontation, and in the process makes a selfless bargain to save the life of someone else. It ends on a bit of a down note, but I don't think there was really any other way to end it.


As I said above, I enjoyed Drive quite a bit: it's a terse, grisly, moody thriller. Sometimes its a bit too artsy for it's own good, and I can see why the film didn't succeed at the box office, since it was marketed as your typical car chase-and-shoot-'em-up brainless action movie. The performances are universally solid, with Albert Brooks showing a side I never would have thought he had. I can see why people thought he should be nominated for an Oscar, but also understand why he wasn't: his character is so unpleasant and such a change in his persona that I bet it put a lot of older Academy voters off.

Drive is definitely in the tradition of those short, sharp gritty urban noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the aforementioned modern takes that came out in the 70s and 80s. If I had one major criticism, I'd say that Drive doesn't really advance the genre past where directors like Michael Mann and William Friedkin left it during the 1980s; sure, characters have cell phones and satellite radio, but there's no sense of how these people on the fringes of society are like now, no great insight into what, if any, living in the 21st Century might be like to someone like Driver.

But maybe the filmmakers weren't trying to do that, so it's best to judge Drive on what it is: an involving, well-acted, well-directed, at-times-grueling story of ugly, violent people, and one of those people's attempt to do something good.

Movie Monday: The Art of the Steal

This week's movie is the 2009 documentary The Art of the Steal!

This movie--which I only knew a little about--was sitting in my Netflix queue for months. One night, Darlin' Tracy and I put on a documentary ostensibly about New York City, which sounded interesting to us. Within a few minutes though, we realized that film was not so much about the city as it was a particularly annoying, long-winded NYC resident. When it became clear he was going to be the center of the film, we mutually decided we couldn't sit through it and turned it off.

Still in a documentary mood, we decided to give The Art of the Steal a shot; and boy were we glad we did!

The Art of Steal initially tells us the story of Albert Barnes, a born-and-raised Philadelphian who, thanks to vast wealth from a invention that took off like a rocket, was at the proverbial right place at the right time, and managed to amass a collection of Post-Impressionist art that, over the years, came to be worth in the billions of dollars. The film has numerous scenes of the stunning work as it hung in the Barnes Foundation:

Years before they're work was appreciated in America, Barnes collected dozens of works by Matisse, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Renoir, and many other important artists. One year he put together a showing, and the then-cognoscenti of the art world blasted the work, which infuriated Barnes. A lifelong Democrat and self-made millionaire, he clearly didn't fit in with the class of people he was now a part of, and came to resent their "anti-intellectualism" and lack of understanding about the other parts of society.

The film features several short clips of home movies of Barnes, who during all this back story looks like a crabby, kinda miserable guy:

But it turns out beneath that taciturn exterior lay the heart of truly kind soul, one of class and taste. Barnes opened his own museum in Lower Merion (a suburb of Philadelphia) and arranged the jaw-dropping collection of art in less formal, more personal style. Hating the self-important detachment of most museums, he crafted his collection to be appreciated by the viewer, rather than have a third party in the middle, explaining why any given painting was important.

Over the years, the world caught up to Barnes', and the monetary value of his collection skyrocketed. Museums and the hoi polloi of Philadelphia begged Barnes for him to share his collection with them; he refused. He turned his museum into a school, giving students access to some of the greatest works of art in history. He also allowed anyone to come and visit the work, but they almost exclusively had to be a regular, middle- or lower-income person; requests to see the work from millionaires were almost always refused.

Barnes' lawyer, John Johnson, had also managed to cultivate quite a collection. But due to an insufficiently crafted will, Johnson's collection was taken over by The Philadelphia Museum of Art, an institution both Barnes and Johnson despised. Seeing how his friends' wishes were ignored after death, Barnes put together a detailed, iron clad set of instructions about his collection, demanding it never be split up, sold, or put on tour as a moneymaking enterprise. Not having any children, he entrusted his wife and then one of his favorite, most trusted students to make sure the collection stayed where it was--in Lower Merion--and be used in the way he intended.

Its at this point that The Art of Steal becomes as close as a talking-head documentary can to a white-knuckle thriller. You care so much about this collection of art, and have so come to appreciate the love, taste, and intelligence that built it, that you dread what's going to happen next.

Eventually, the Barnes Collection is taken over by someone who decides, in order to "save" it, to do the exact thing Barnes didn't want: to put it out on tour, all over the world, where it rakes in millions of dollars and is viewed by the upper crust:

I don't generally think of myself as a class warrior, but I will admit that watching footage (like you see above) of the super-rich enjoying the Barnes Collection, glasses of champagne in hand, made my blood boil. Sequestering the art, making it the wallpaper for a society event, does such a disservice to the work that I felt like we were watching a tragedy take place.

Its a testament to the work of the filmmakers, but most especially director Don Argott, that they are able to stir such passions over what some would consider a pretty small issue, in terms of the kinds of stuff documentaries typically cover (the Holocaust, Hurricane Katrina, our food supply, etc.). Argott uses some interesting visual tricks in some scenes, like when playing the audio of an interview with one of the people accused of trying to get their hands on the Barnes' paintings:

Now, this interview was recorded in the mid-90s, long after compact discs were introduced, and there were half a dozen different ways to present this audio. But by using an old, beat-up, out-of-date tape recorder, the film gives this interview--which is fairly bland--a sort of secretive, back room kind of feel, like Oliver Stone did with JFK. Its an effective directorial sleight of hand.

After much legal rangling, lawsuits, lies, distortions, and PR campaigns, the Barnes Collection is legally allowed to be removed from its home. The film ends with those fighting to keep the paintings in Merion losing their final court case, and the groundwork being laid for their new home in Center City Philly:

The Art of the Steal is decidedly one-sided; it has a POV that it wears on it sleeve. To be fair to the filmmakers, almost every single one of the people who were on the other side of the argument were invited to be in the film, but declined. And if you look at this story just in the broad strokes, it sounds like those who want the paintings moved are being completely reasonable. Its only by digging deeper that you see that this is a case of a small number of powerful, rich people deciding they can invalidate the wishes of one man, but still use his name in the promotion of that effort.

I have to admit, having been born in Philly and lived in the tri-state are almost my entire life, I felt like a cultural illiterate having never even heard this story. It filled endless newspaper columns over the last several decades, was about art, yet it was completely off my radar. So, if nothing else, I have The Art of the Steal to thank for educating me on this very compelling subject.

As I said above, this whole issue is not quite as titanic as the movie makes it out to be; its a testament to the film that, as you watch it, you feel like its The Most Important Thing Ever. It would be interesting to see these same filmmakers take on a fictional story and see if their skills would translate. If they did, it make for one hell of a ride!