My Kid Could Paint That

Director: Amir Bar-Lev

What constitutes great art? Is modern and abstract art simply a joke on the viewer? If anyone could grab a brush and splatter drops of paint on a canvas, does that make the work of Jackson Pollock less valid?

It’s a conversation I’ve had many times before with others and it’s one of the major questions that run throughout documentarian Amir Bar-Lev’s fascinating portrait of four year old Marla Olmstead who, a painter since she sat on her dining room table in diapers with a brush in her hand, became one of the world’s most popular abstract artists before she even set foot into preschool.

Given Marla’s undeniable passion for painting, her loving dental assistant mother Laura and hobbyist painter/Frito-Lay employee father, Mark encouraged her in her efforts and were surprised when, after Marla’s work was on display in a local coffee shop, Marla garnered the admiration and support of local painter Anthony Brunelli who was so impressed by Marla that he staged a show for the artist in his gallery. A local journalist specializing in articles on kids and family covered the Olmsteads and after the local Binghamton, New York newspaper piece was picked up by The New York Times, a media feeding frenzy was born that went from adoration to suspicion and controversy when 60 Minutes planted a hidden camera inside the Olmstead’s residence that seemed to indicate that young Marla was being coached by her father.

Were Marla’s works fraudulent? If they’re beautiful, does it really matter who paints them? Filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev was given unprecedented access to the Olmsteads for a year and it was about halfway through his documentary on the quiet, gifted young artist when media accusations were born and suddenly his film became something different altogether when there were enough scenes, conversations and arguments to have not only the average viewer but Bar-Lev who, by that point, had gotten very close to his subjects question the validity of the artwork and fingers began pointing in the direction of Mark Olmstead.

As Jason Guerrasio wrote in “The Unseen Hand,” published in the Fall 2007 issue of Filmmaker Magazine, “Regardless of whether you walk away from… [the] film thinking Marla does the paintings on her own or not, what My Kid Could Paint That definitely demonstrates is that our culture is obsessed with putting people on a pedestal and then gleefully knocking them off at the moment their talents are in question.”

Compelling and sharp with a modest running time of only eighty-three fast paced minutes, My Kid Could Paint That is the type of film you’ll want to discuss endlessly with friends but unlike most films about art, Bar-Lev is compassionate and earnest in never letting us forget that at the heart of the entire situation is an unquestionably lovable and creative little girl, who has been thrust into the spotlight at far too young of an age by not only the media but her family as well.

Day Zero

Director: Brian Gunnar Cole

“It’s our turn, guys. It’s only fair,” James Dixon (Jon Bernthal) reasons to his two best friends only a few scenes into director Brian Gunnar Cole’s feature film debut. In trying to air on the side of logic and patriotic duty, James argues the positive of the situation that finds the three friends all summoned for service in the American military from a reinstated draft that had lured sixteen million men into the armed forces from World War I through Vietnam before its suspension. Now, set in the near distant future of a world not only hit hard from the attacks of 9/11 but another lethal fictitious attack on Los Angeles, the draft has been made active again. According to the film, the draft coincides with our war on terror overseas growing much larger, encompassing other countries and the unfortunate need for an estimated twenty-five thousand additional troops is discussed on the radio has hopefully been satisfied by increasing the maximum draftable age to thirty-five years old, not only recruiting just college age men but leaders in corporate America as well.

While cab driver James Dixon eagerly looks forward to follow in the long line of soldiers in his family before he falls in love with a sociology graduate student (Elisabeth Moss), the timing couldn’t be worse for his two friends, neurotic writer Aaron Feller (Elijah Wood) halfway through his follow up book to his first successful work and married lawyer George Rifkin (Chris Klein) who has just been made partner of his firm and also can’t bear the thought of being away from his loving cancer survivor wife Molly (Ginnifer Goodwin) who’s recently made it to her five year disease free status. George’s actions to try and find a loophole out of the contract with Uncle Sam and Aaron’s increasingly erratic behavior after his indifferent therapist (Ally Sheedy) inspires him to create and carry out the items of a top ten list send him chasing down new experiences such as skydiving to far riskier fare, further alienate Dixon from his friends. Although, it seems illogical that three very different characters would remain this close for years and at times their actions seem far too contrived to believe and instead feel like they're just hitting some required notes in the “soldier movie” cliché list, it’s a compelling film made all the more timely given our fears of what kind of global climate has been evolving since we invaded Iraq.

While we’re always riveted by Klein and especially the fiery and passionate Bernthal, ultimately it is veteran actor Wood who is given the most highly unbelievable role of the film as a young man whose actions defy common sense as he begins to lose his grip of reality far too quickly. Adding insult to injury, the ultimately vague and perfunctory conclusion feels like a cheat to audiences who’ve invested time and emotion in the tale and it seems that director Cole and writer Robert Malkani quit filming about one or two vital minutes too early, as a more decisive action by one of the two characters we see in the final sequence would’ve had a greater impact than it’s passive blink-and-you-missed-it conclusion. For a better film about the moral quandaries of fighting our current war, look for Kimberly Peirce’s Stop Loss coming to theatres in a few weeks but Cole and Malkani at least receive admirable points for effort and intention for a work that, although uneven, never fails to make us think.

Rendition

Director:
Gavin Hood

Director of the Oscar winning Best Foreign Film Tsotsi, former lawyer Gavin Hood calls on both his legal expertise and interest in the moral issues of politics for his follow-up film Rendition. The film, one of the first to crash and burn at the box office in America where audiences decided to vote against the war in Iraq and instead go for alternative entertainment, gets a second life on DVD where it should fare much better given that films of bleak subject matter tend to overwhelm on the big screen and also due to the jaw-droppingly talented cast of Oscar winners and nominees.

Reese Witherspoon plays Isabella, a devoted wife roughly eight months pregnant living in Chicago with her husband, son and mother-in-law. When her brainy chemical engineer husband Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian who holds a green card but not U.S. citizenship fails to return from his conference in Capetown, South Africa, Isabella fears the worst as it’s revealed that Anwar has been taken into CIA custody and rerouted shortly after his D.C. arrival to another country where he can be tortured and interrogated ceaselessly for information related to American national security. After it’s learned that his cell phone received several incoming calls from a known global terrorist Anwar is apprehended and his rights are stripped under the rendition policy which, born under the Clinton administration has become increasingly utilized after Bush’s war on terror began to transfer prisoners to other facilities in countries where the laws on how to acquire intelligence are far more dangerous and employ both electricity and later the infamous topic of waterboarding in a number of brutally intense scenes. Metwally’s Anwar manages to hold his own, insisting that he is innocent and that there has been some type of mistake which eventually finds an advocate in young CIA desk worker Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) who was grudgingly promoted to attending the interrogation after a colleague was killed in a terror attack.

Back in the states, worried and frightened Isabella tries to piece together the puzzle of her husband’s disappearance by asking help of Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard) an old flame from college who now works in a prominent position as an aid for Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin). Acting on her behalf, Alan repeatedly tries to get the attention of CIA head Corrine Whitman (a chilling Meryl Streep) which results in the film’s best scene when fed up from unanswered calls, he confronts her in public to no avail. In addition to the main plot, another is interwoven back in South Africa as a teenaged girl (Yigal Naor) runs away from her domineering father (who is running the Anwar interrogation) to stay with her boyfriend as he begins to climb the ranks of a small sect of a much larger terror network responsible for the blast that killed Freeman’s colleague. If it sounds confusing, it is very much so as the film careens a bit out of control near the ending when the plotlines intersect and there’s a few jumps in time and place that will make your head spin.

The actors, especially Metwally are all very good, although Gyllenhaal seems far too young for his role, but ultimately, you’re left dissatisfied by an overly complicated finale that The Big Picture’s Colin Boyd noted leaves us to not only wonder “what happens next to so many of these characters,” but we’re also asked “to assume a considerable amount by the end.” It’s these loose ends and Rendition’s resulting air of mystery that doesn’t seem to fit the film’s tone as a think piece rather than a Clancy like thriller but hopefully, at the very least, it will get viewers talking about the tactics used to extract information and how reliable or moral they are in our global climate.