At Eternity’s Gate
Portrait-Self
Official Site | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 111 min

What a time to be a Vincent van Gogh fan.  A year ago, we got the cinematic treat of a lifetime that was like walking around, and living and breathing in his paintings!!!  And this year, artist and director Julian Schnabel gives us a cinematic treat of his own with At Eternity’s Gate.  The film shows us what it was like to walk alongside Vincent as he went about creating his brilliant art, while living a most turbulent and troubled life.  Schnabel is somehow able to express Vincent’s pain and process channeled through the steady and unsteady hands and face of Willem Dafoe (maybe too perfect a Vincent!).  More poetry than biopic, Eternity delivers on the tall task of getting into Vinny’s head and expressing how he suffered for his art.  Thank you for suffering Vincent.  And thank you Julian and Willem, for somehow materializing that suffering.  Suffering never looked so beautiful.

Verdictgo: high end Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Gate opens today in limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Jean Christian Bourcart shattered glass portraits – Cannes 1990

featuring David Lynch, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Walken, Idrissa Ouedraogo and Isabella Rosseliini

Out of the Furnace
Men of Steel Town
Official ‘Website’ | Trailers & Mo
R | 116 min

There seems to be some kinda minor-renaissance of gritty American shoot-em-up flicks these days.  It’s like the 70s all over again, cept not really.  With the overload of superhero drivel and toy driven babble dominating theaters, this resurgence is a good thing, and change of pace, even if the results have been a little uneven.  Take last year’s Killing Them Softly – a lil flick trying so hard to be mad hard and mad cool (like Mads Mikkelsen), and make a statement or something, but missed the mark, and bored we to tears.  Then there was the The Place Beyond The Pines, which was too much of a good thing, cramming 3 movies into 1, when it probably should have dumped at least one of them, or just been 9 hours of Ryan Gosling riding bikes.  And now comes Scott Cooper‘s Out of The Furnace, which get high marks for acting, attitude, and appearance, but by the time it wraps up, I kinda was like, um, er, uh, that was it?  What exactly was all that for?

But hey, where else are you gonna see Christian Bale smolder, with beautiful longerish hair, as an older brother’s keeper to misfit troublemaker Casey Affleck (he does his best work when he doesn’t open his mouth), and melt the heart Zoe Saldana, and go hunting with uncle Sam Shepard, and listen to Forest Whitaker try to sound like the dude with half a face on Boardwalk Empire, and see who can be more smiley & gruffy & tuffy betweenith Willem Dafoe or Woody Harrelson??????  WHERE ELSE YOU GONNA SEE THIS???  Even if the hunt and be hunted intensity that fills a majority of the film kinda fizzles out at the end, it’s gritty good enuff for me, and should be gritty good enuff for you too

Lil tidbit – the film takes place in the steel-mill town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, where a 1941 novel of a similar name – Out of This Furnace – also took place.  FURNACE THAT!!!!!!!!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Furnace smolders with acting in limited release, and soon at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…