The daily grind: Tim Jenison learns to make pigments prior to attempting a Vermeer.
Tim's Vermeer reviewed for RogerEbert.com; Brightest Star reviewed for same. One's good and interesting, the other not so much.
While I note, with bemusement, that a commenter below has taken me to task for some "same-old same-old" critic bashing, and hence I ought to be more maybe more circumspect before making note of this, but hey, YOLO and all that: I was a little surprised that my friend Manohla Dargis took such a hostile tack against Tim's Vermeer in her review of the movie in the Times today, expressing, in her customary vivid and vigorous language, a real distaste with pretty much all of the people responsible. I cite this not to take Dargis to task, but merely because the movie she describes is pretty much the movie I was dreading before I saw Tim's Vermeer at the New York Film Festival. I thought the actual film sidestepped glib reductionism and offered fascinating casework detail (while also, less fortunately but not fatally, sidestepping a lot of aesthetic ind philosophical implications). Manohla makes a case, though, and in a lively way. See the movie and decide for yourself, as they say.
Great review, one typo: “One might entire feeling wary that the movie, in depicting an attempt to duplicate Vermeer’s achievement, might also glibly undercut it;…”
Should that “entire” be “enter”?
Yes, thanks, I’ll see about getting it fixed.