Directed by Jonathan Parker
(R)
***
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A satirical look at art and commerce in New York’s gallery scene
This “brave little movie” about New York’s contemporary art and music scene “deserves an audience,” said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. In director Jonathan Parker’s “acutely witty” satire of contemporary artists and collectors, Adam Goldberg and Eion Bailey play siblings caught up in an artistic rivalry. Radiating the “neurotic intensity of a Woody Allen character without a punch line,” Goldberg is a struggling composer who makes music by popping bubble wrap and smashing wine glasses. Bailey is a semi-successful painter, whose pastel abstractions decorate corporate offices and hospital lobbies. The “potentially loaded artistic and fraternal conflicts” between the two men are never fully realized, said Gary Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. The director is having too much fun mocking the aesthetics and business of art today to study their relationship. In general, he “strikes a mostly happy balance” between accurate observation and satirical exaggeration. Parker is “gratifyingly serious about the struggle of creating art in a compromised world,” said Scott Tobias in The Onion. The film’s teasingly thoughtful way of exploring precisely how to do that makes (Untitled) stand apart.
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