22:31 Saturday, May 05 2008

youth without youth

This evening, I watched Youth without Youth. This was one really bizarre film. I'm not entirely sure exactly what happened. Its somehow about this 70 year old man who gets struck by lightening, and then proceeds to age in reverse. Beyond that, not much else makes any sense. There's this subplot of some Nazi hooker trying to seduce him, and him having weird telepathic skills to kill off some bad Nazi doctor. Then there's this other odd subplot where he meets this 25 year old tourist in India, who somehow keeps going into multiple personalities who are these ancient beings who speak prehistoric languages, and then she starts aging rapidly until the primary character leaves. All the while, the film was somewhat compelling, as it was just so strange.
Afterwards, I watched the documentary, My Kid Could Paint That. From the description and the trailer, it sounded like this was a film mocking the modern art scene, and how alot of the supposedly great art pieces are the same as what a child could do with finger paints. Instead it focused exclusively on this one 4 year old in upstate NY, who was amazing all the art critics with her work. Then it went down this path of focusing on how all of her work might actually be faked by her father, and really presented the parents in an unflattering light. I think the most pathetic part was her mother who was repeatedly stating that she didn't want the fame & fortune for her daughter, and claimed to be happy that people were losing interest, yet all the while was clearly loving it. It looked to me like the parents were clearly pushing their child to do the paintings, and the father was obsessed about it. Also, this kid has a website where they're still trying to sell her art to this day.