Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: Climates
Next story: Winter Journey

Cinema Interruptus

Three movies I wasn’t able to sit all the way through: Matthew Barney: Without Restraint is a documentary about the controversial artist. Though it dips into his history and the Cremaster cycle, it concentrates primarily on the making of his most recent work, Drawing Restraint 9, which has only had limited screenings. In other words, this is the equivalent of one of those “making-of” documentaries you find on DVDs. And if you’re hoping that it will elucidate anything about Barney’s work (other than that he gets to do it because he has a lot of rich backers), you are sadly mistaken…Like most film nerds of my generation, I once had a substantial crush on Diane Keaton. Let’s face it, any moderately attractive woman who would date someone like Woody Allen held out hope for all the rest of us, right? But the endless stream of crap movies she’s been in since 1991’s Father of the Bride put an end to that. The best thing I can say about Because I Said So, in which she plays a fretful mother trying to find love for daughter Mandy Moore, is that it seemed less obnoxious than The Family Stone, faint praise at best. Nothing in the half-hour that I sat through gave any indication that I was watching the work of human beings rather than computers that chew up other movies and spit back out new clones…I laughed twice during Epic Movie, the number one film at the box office this past weekend: once at some blatantly fake snakes, again at Kevin MacDonald as an over-the-hill Harry Potter. But I’d laugh at anything Kevin MacDonald did, and I didn’t so much laugh as smile a little. That aside, this string of kneejerk parodies made last year’s wretched Date Movie look like the collected works of George Bernard Shaw.