A talk with director Sam Cullman on "Art and Craft".

The End of the Tour

Great poster! Beautiful concept. The image tells us everything we'd want to know about the film. Especially gutsy is the decision to exclude Jesse Eisenberg's and Jason Segel's faces. It's called a two-hander . In the theatre it connotes a play with only two actors. hink Driving Miss Daisy or most plays by Samuel Beckett. In The End of the Tour , Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg and director James Ponsoldt take the two hander into movie land, albeit with a supporting cast (including a hilarious comedic acting turn courtesy of Joan Cusack) and make it into a genuine, moving, funny, and heart-wrenching bit of cinema. The celebrity writer and his admirer. Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel. We may never know who David Foster Wallace really was. Already his estate is disowning this film - but the truth about that is also up for grabs. All we have is the film, exhibit A (if you will), and what we read about it, along with Mr. Wallace'...

Locke

Locke's poster suggests speed. In fact, the BMW Locke drives down Britain's M6 motorway never goes above 60 mph. The movements here are all inside Locke's mind. Wonderful. Watching Locke you get the feeling the film was written and directed by a twenty five year old upstart. A kid , really, more interested in innovation than emotion. I looked up the writer/director. He is 56 year old Steven Knight, a Brit, and with a string of screenwriting credits behind him. So...that was my first misconception. The second one actually took place before I saw the film. I had read that the entire film took place inside a moving car, the camera trained on Mr. Hardy, and that was pretty much it. How, I wondered, could this possibly be anything more than an interesting, meandering, but ultimately failed experiment? As I say, that was my second misconception. The landscape of Tom Hardy's face in Locke registers a gamut of feelings. It's as much of a canvas as the surrounding l...

Art and Craft documents forger's fictions

A while back a story appeared about an art forger who'd pulled the proverbial wool over hundreds of art curator's eyes over a time period spanning several decades. The forger, Mark Landis, had been exposed, was still at it, and no legal body could jail him or force him to cease and desist because no transaction took place; Landis donated his forgeries, dressing up the con with a superbly crafted narrative about family inheritance, blue blooded ancestors wishing to give charitably to museums, and in many cases disguising himself as a (freakin!) priest to sell the lie. A fabulous moment in Art and Craft shows Landis blessing a passerby. We laugh and laugh some more. Anyway........cut to Brooklyn and a group (Sam Cullman , Mark Becker , Jennifer Grausman) of indie doc makers. There begins the longitudinal filmmaking process spanning - I believe - nearly three years. The resulting film, Art and Craft, is a must see. Mark Landis, as we learn, ha...

Cinema, Literature, Theater, Music, Art.

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