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Saturday, May 5, 2018

LOVING VINCENT (2017)

This critically well-received, but painfully misconceived animated film investigates the last few months in the life of Vincent Van Gogh by tracking down people who knew or at least interacted with him before his suicide. As the film has it, a last letter from Vincent to his brother Theo, never got thru. Now, one year after Vincent’s death, the Postman’s son is charged with making good on delivery. But Theo has also died, so the postman’s son tries finding out what happened, and what best to do with the letter, moving thru a series of unlikely interviews as if he were building up a case for some victim; art history as police procedural. The real point of the film lies in the unusual, painterly look of its rotoscoped images*, animated with a handsome, if often stiff & cumbersome, oil paint based animation technique. It provides some striking Van Gogh-ish images (many wheat fields & crows in faux impasto), but is it homage, kitschy ripoff or pointless show? Grabbing the Van Gogh visual vocabulary one purloined picture per setting; it's museum gift shop memento mori.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Rotoscoping involves various techniques that turn filmed live-action into animation. Headache inducing in posterizations like Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE/’01 and some of Ralph Bakshi’s work (WIZARDS/’77; LORD OF THE RINGS/78), it dates back to early Disney feature animation where it was put to better use more as guidepost than stencil.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: This film's co-writer/director Hugh Welchman produced Suzie Templeon’s stunning stop-motion adaptation of PETER & THE WOLF/’06 which has the perfect match-up of form to content missing here.

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