Holiday Movie Rec: The Maiden Heist

It is still the holidays, right? Well, if you are scrounging around for something to do with all your free time before the New Year begins, may I suggest:

Art + Crime + Christopher Walken doing comedy=
The Maiden Heist.


Obviously, I quite like the elements both separately and together. It’s a fairly good film, certainly passable holiday entertainment, but you probably won’t hear about it because the financing company had a bit of a
hiccup and poof went the money for promotion.




The Maiden Heist stars Morgan Freeman, Christopher Walken, William H. Macy, and Marcia Gay Harden in a comedy centered on three museum security guards who devise a plan to steal back their favorite artworks before they are transferred to another museum. It’s a labor of love, and the characters get into all the trouble you might expect and then some. It’s really worth it just to see Christopher Walken in a snorkel mask at the end. Just a thought if you don’t know what to do with yourselves over the break.

Something Weird This Way Comes

Ah, love that title. It’s from my new article on the Tim Burton at MoMA exhibition up on Blogcritics. To wit:

It certainly must feel strange for an isolated kid from the suburbs of California to have hundreds of his drawings and objects ensconced in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. No less so because he is known for his films rather than his drawings. Yet if the opening crowds are anything to judge by, most museum-goers are nothing but thrilled to see this exhaustive exhibition of 700+ works related to Tim Burton’s career. The crowds are right, for the same aesthetic binds Burton’s early work to his later films.

Face the crowds you must, if you want to wander through the strange byproducts of Burton’s imaginative mind. MoMA created a great entrance: through the mouth of a monster you enter a black and white striped hall lined with TVs playing a series of Stainboy animations. Then you enter a dark room where a carousel turns to creepy carnival music and glow-in-the-dark paintings on black velvet stare out at you. Next you enter the well-lit, white-walled galleries of MoMA – but even here things don’t return to normalcy. The walls are filled with hundreds of sketches of monsters and people on everything from canvas to cocktail napkins.

Rest here.

And a happy weird Tuesday to you all.

h

Keats and Autumn


I saw Bright Star yesterday, a very romantic film about Romantic poet John Keats. Liberties may have been taken with the poet’s love life, but the quiet, well shot movie is a beautiful period piece nonethless. Ben Wihshaw certainly looks the part of the 25 year old Romantic poet dying of consumption. There are some gorgeous shots of the English countryside. However the chief virtue of Bright Star must be the way it slowly takes you through some of Keat’s verse.

It skipped the poem that I hoped to hear; his Ode to Autumn being very perfect for this time of year.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

j