Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Goingbegging This one certainly makes good entertainment - which may be half the trouble.It's the story of a California grandmother buying an abstract painting in a junk-shop for $5, and then being tipped-off that it looks like an original Jackson Pollock, worth up to $50 million, if proved genuine.You don't have to dig very deep into the story before it starts to rattle, and not only because California is the natural habitat for wild theories of this sort. There is just too much of the pantomime about it all. The woman in question (Teri) is a long-distance truck-driver, who looks surprisingly genteel for one of that trade, as though she is posing as trailer-trash, with philistine opinions about abstract art - as echoed in the somewhat bowdlerised title of the film. She claims that a picture ought to 'look like something'. Well then, why choose such an unlikely present for a friend, when she could have found a nice harmless landscape or a bowl of fruit? On come the experts, who are quick to remind us about 'provenance' - a word she claims she has never heard before. Thomas Hoving of the New York Met talks in an impossibly conceited way about his status as an authenticator of paintings, clearly acting a snob character-part, to get us taking sides in the big contest: connoisseurship v. folksy fireside wisdom.Well, we certainly do take sides, even sometimes changing sides, as the evidence gradually comes to light. Apparently fingerprints have a lot to do with it, since Pollock despised the brush and palette. They even bring in a fingerprint expert from the Canadian Mounties - another over-theatrical touch. Two of the so-called experts insist that the painting is genuine, but it turns out that both of them were previously jailed for fraud. It is even claimed that the painting doesn't show enough evidence of Pollock's permanent drunkenness on the job!Unfortunately, the closer you look at Teri, the more you conclude that she is just a little unhinged altogether. When she finally understood what provenance meant, she invented a colourful ancestry for the painting, and at least one expert swallowed it whole. Last heard-of, she had turned down a $9 million offer, still holding out for the big fifty, even though authentication is looking more elusive than ever. And it will take more than Joe Beam and his (excruciating) country song about her to get me voting against the smart-and-smarmy experts, as I believe I'm meant to.

Johann_Cat I have an extended meditation here, but the bottom line is this: the film is scientifically dumb and manipulative. The critic Hoving offers real kickers to the myth of that this junk-shop painting (owned by Ms. Horton) was made by Pollock. The director chose to repress (or was too dull to uncover) these simple, myth-busting facts. Hoving relates these in a letter in ArtNews magazine: 1) that the Horton found-in-a-junk-shop item was painted on a stock, commercially framed-and-sized canvas. Pollock never used such, but used odd-ball, idiosyncratically sized canvases; and 2) the paints in the Horton image are all acrylics (acrylics were scarcely available to Pollock, and though he used a few, he is on record as _never_ making an entire painting of _nothing but_ acrylics!).--- This film's subject, an elderly woman who begins to be convinced she found an enormous Jackson Pollock painting at a junk shop, is sometimes an amusing character; she has a compelling, hard scrabble background and can spin a fanciful yarn. But I can find such a person in most any saloon. Her stubbornness is not an unusual human trait, but the filmmaker is in awe of it, and seems to follow it as a potential guide to a painting's authenticity. But stubbornness is not equal in value to reasoned principles. The film makes occasional offers of an unbiased assessment as to whether this painting is a real Pollock or not. But its main argument remains something like "hard-headed wishing can make it so"--this shtick isn't non-conformist, though the filmmaker tries to sell it that way. Regardless of anybody's politics, I think this documentary curiously reflects the G. W. Bush era of feelings-over-reason in which it was made. The film's most dubious character is not Volpe, the ex-con (and admitted con-man) art dealer hired by Ms. Horton to sell her painting, but the Montreal painting analyst Biro, who claims that a smudged, partial fingerprint on the rear of the Horton canvas is a certain match to a smudge on a paint can handled by Pollock. Common sense and actual criminal science forensic fingerprint analysts (e.g., see the Fine Arts Registry website and Tom Hanley's analysis) claim that these prints are too compromised and small to be of scientific use. (Biro also seems to have placed a rubber stamp of _the same print on the Horton_ onto the back of another unsigned "possible" Pollock--who could find that compelling?) The film is bewilderingly short on educated, detailed responses comparing line and color in the Horton painting and actual Pollocks. This made the film seem like it had something to hide behind Biro's carny-man bluster about fingerprints. Here's an example of the kind of analysis I'd like more of: based on images of the Horton painting in the film, I judge that it is that this is a fake (not a counterfeit, but an amused homage) Pollock made in the 1970s. I offer this guess because of the colors and their proximity in the painting. The rest of my impression is based on the density of the design and the monotony of the curved shapes in the painting. Pollock often used colors (colors that strike on me as "50s colors") that were dark, intense, metallic or earthy. Rarely does he put colors like bright orange, turquoise, and red hard against each other. Admittedly he does use some bright colors in "Number 5," but there the yellow and red are spread far apart and not densely laced on top of each other. The amounts of turquoise and orange in the Horton painting seem especially un-Pollock like, and the swirls seem too uninterrupted, repetitious, and densely layered. The stuffy, old-school curator (Thomas Hoving), brought in early in the film, tosses off the observation that the Horton painting is too compact and busy to be a Pollock--and that remains one of the few painting-literate analyses in the whole #$&%*(^ movie. Most Pollocks give the viewer a sense of receding spaces beyond the surface that the Horton painting lacks. Pollock paintings also tend to have more straight lines made by sharp, whip-like gestures of the painter's arm and hand and have areas that seem more calligraphic than just randomly swirled as the Horton painting does. If one is familiar with Pollock's pre-spatter style, which often involved calligraphic and/or vaguely figural designs, sometimes Picasso-esque, one can see more abstract but still distinct versions of such pre-spatter era designs within the Pollock spatter paintings of the late 40s and 1950s. The Horton painting seems an aggressive, monotonous collection of swirls. This is admittedly what many people claim all Pollock paintings look like. But the devil is in the details: I have yet to see a certified Pollock that looks like the Horton painting.

moonspinner55 Documentary about one Teri Horton, a 73-year-old former truck driver (with a colorful and precarious past) who bought a peculiar painting one day in a California thrift shop--only to discover it might be a lost masterwork from famed artist Jackson Pollock. Horton, eager to sell the painting and get on her feet financially, is unable to convince the skeptical art world of her treasure, with naysayers far outweighing the handful of experts who find evidence the painting is indeed a Pollock (the artist left the work unsigned, though a fingerprint on the back is an exact match to the now-deceased maestro). Elements of Pollock's life are explored and intersected with Horton's own background; she tells at one point of a suicide attempt that went amusingly wrong, and her no-nonsense manner and pithy, seen-it-all demeanor are both funny and touching. Short at 74 minutes, the documentary is entertaining, perhaps minor, though a testament to the stubborn human spirit. Offered nine million dollars at one point, Horton refused to give the painting up, wanting her share of the American dream for what it is rightfully going for on the artists market. **1/2 from ****

gattihogan hi . am i the only person who noticed that when the painting was compared with the known Pollock that the two seemed to be part of the same piece of canvas, like the piece had been cut to a smaller size? there were lines that crossed over at the right places, like a puzzle would fit. i especially followed some of the yellow lines and they were continuous on both paintings. seems worth a closer look to me. i enjoyed the movie.since we are a love Pollock,hate Pollack family , it was fun to watch this film together although no one changed their mind on their position.we tried to get to MOMA recently but picked the one day that it was closed. i'll try again the next time we are in new york.