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Recently Released In Theaters Reviews
COMIC-CON COVERAGE! Step Brothers American Teen X-Files: I Want to Believe Brideshead Revisited The Dark Knight Mamma Mia! Take Space Chimps Hellboy II: The Golden Army Journey to the Center of the Earth Garden Party August Diminished Capacity Kabluey Recently Added Spotlights Heath Ledger Christian Bale Aaron Eckhart Maggie Gyllenhaal Gary Oldman Minnie Driver Brendan Fraser Anita Briem Josh Hutcherson James McAvoy Brittany Snow Matthew Broderick The Jonas Brothers Mike Myers Romany Malco |
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 Amir Bar-Lev
Interview By: Michael Dance Amir Bar-Lev has a lot on his mind. The documentary he directed, My Kid Could Paint That, tackles such lofty questions as: what is art? Is surrealist and abstract art a huge sham? How close should a documentarian get to his subjects? On a micro scale, however, there's another question no less pertinent: did a four-year-old "art prodigy" who sold abtract paintings for thousands of dollars secretly get help from her father? All these things are discussed in the film, which was a hit at Sundance and is now opening in theaters. In making the film, Bar-Lev followed around the Olmstead family, whose young daughter Marla is the alleged prodigy. At first, that was all there was to it; only later did a 60 Minutes story come out that called the legitimacy of Marla's paintings into question. For Bar-Lev, who had grown to like the Olmsteads a good deal, things got a lot more complicated. "The film is sort of a 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' story," Bar-Lev tells us. "Really, it's about a juggernaut of fame that sort of snowballs out of control. It's a cautionary tale, about how once you enter the public arena in that way, you can't control your story, other people own your story. I've always felt, if there was some involvement in the paintings from [the father] Mark Olmstead, it was far less a result of greed than it was a case in which that story snowballed out of control. The reason, perhaps, again, this is conjecture, but what makes sense to me is, the reason they didn't shut everything down after 60 Minutes, was that they were trying to wrestle back control of their story, and wrestle back their reputation." Bar-Lev's most pressing concern was to present an equal argument for both sides and try to remain as neutral as possible, which was made all the more difficult by his relationship with the Olmstead family. "I really felt torn; depicting the Olmsteads as accurately as possible, but I also wanted to depict them the way they would like to be depicted, too," he says, perhaps tacitly admitting that sometimes the truth hurts. "Actually, if I had gotten footage in the end of Marla doing a painting which absolutely convinced me that she was a genius, or, on the other hand, I had gotten footage of her dad doing a painting, it would've made life pretty easy. Because I would know that had to go in the film, and I would know how exactly to portray that family." Unfortunately, there were no easy answers, and the film shows us Bar-Lev grappling with these issues. "This is kind of abstract, but it starts as a film about the question, why don't people just paint things to make them look the way they look in the real world? Why do you not paint representationally, and how do we value |
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