Word: pollock
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Actor nominees announced. Tom Hanks (zzzzzzzzzzz), Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe (Who will he take to the Oscars? Meg Ryan? Courtney Love? Leelee Sobieski? Nicole Kidman? Tom Cruise?), Javier Bardem, Ed Harris (directed himself in "Pollock," as if he learned acting from Barbra Streisand...
...austerities of Minimalism were taken to be the drastic and morally bracing purge needed after the increasingly routine, splish-splosh indulgences of the would-be heirs of de Kooning, Pollock et al. One thing that late AbEx clearly showed was that nothing is easier to feign than the marks of intense emotional feeling. Those marks too become conventional signs, like the rococo trills of an energetically dying diva. You may enjoy them, but not as unmediated passion...
...hard to come by. That was when people started telling us that "greatness" in art is a subjective business, culturally constructed and so forth, and this neat device let them pretend that (save me your howls of anguish) Toni Morrison deserves a Nobel Prize in literature, or that Jackson Pollock's paint-spattered canvases are 20th century versions of the Mona Lisa, or that Elton John deserves a knighthood...
...MARCIA GAY HARDEN POLLOCK There's this really fearless quality to her, this dark side," says Ed Harris, who directed and played opposite Harden in the brutally honest biography of the self-absorbed, self-destructive and sullenly inarticulate genius of American action painting. "She's not afraid to be ugly." Or, as it turns out, to admit even at this late date that she doesn't fully understand her character, Pollock's wife Lee Krasner, who pretty much abandoned her painting career to support his. She guesses Krasner "sacrificed what she sacrificed" because "she loved him first and foremost...
Harris' great performance has a kind of blank grimness; it contains not a single moment of charm or self-awareness. Harris never allows his exhibitions of Pollock's inexplicable gift to soften or redeem the man's monstrousness. The result is a harrowing film, impossible to "like" in any conventional way, hypnotically impossible to turn away from...