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...dull, awkwardly written biopics about fantastically over-rated megalomaniacs?

No offense intended, Patrick. I didn't like a minute of that film, which I suppose makes it a successful movie about Pollock, sine I find his persona and myth as tedious and overblown as Jim Morrison's. He has a handful of great paintings--Jim Morrison has a handful of great songs--but mostly he was a whiny, self-important drunk. If he was tortured, it was probably the knowledge that he was one of the 20th century's great one-trick ponies that did the job.

As a film, well, I found Harris's performance pretty spot-on, insofar as it was vapid, and got along on the back of pensive looks and tantrums, a la Pollock himself. The score was irritating, as well, but not half as irritating as the Art History 101 lessons about abstraction scattered hither and thither. Any more forced and it could've been dialogue from a Godard movie, but whereas Godard was conscious of putting his words in the mouths of actors, Harris seems to be oblivious to the fact that artists and critics don't talk about art that way. The only other cringer of that caliber is the gallery conversation in Far From Heaven. This is the sort of canned profundity that gives people exactly the wrong idea about what art is and how they should approach it, and since cinema seems to be the only place people are willing to see abstract paintings, that's the only place they're likely to get their vocabulary.

Sorry, I can understand why one might like the movie, but I really did not, and I was hoping I would. Although the biography it's based on is similarly embarrassing, so I don't know why I was expecting better.



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