The recent days in Houston have been the coldest days locals have seen in apparently, "forever". The city shut down on many fronts, and I celebrated by staying in, keeping warm, and catching up on some documentaries I'd wanted to spend more time with. Two of them I felt were worth mentioning, in part because of the discussion I had to myself about the two of them as comparisons.
"Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight"is a documentary worth seeing (to those interested), which provides the viewer a nice body of Glaser's works over the span of his career. The documentary claims its worthiness by providing the viewer, especially the viewer who knows nothing of Glaser, a grasp on who he is, what he has done that is considered important, and why the you should like him. If the point of the documentary was that and nothing else, it would infinitely succeed. Outside of the collection of works presented, however, I felt the documentary failed at capturing the attention of the viewer as as film. The interviews collected were generally of people who just showed their praise towards the film's subject, the artist, Glaser. While Glaser does deserve full praise for his work, the film became cumbersome because of the lack of insight from the interviews conducted. It is in part the filmmaker's job to figure out how to make the interviews meet up to the subject matter regardless of how interesting or not the interviewees are, and in this sense I believe the film did not meet the high marks I was hoping for. Regardless, I enjoyed the fact that by showing the works of someone like Glaser, that a non-artist viewer might gain some insight as seeing artists a little more abstractly, in the sense that being an artist doesn't mean someone who paints or sculpts, but is someone who lives artistically, in some respect or in many respects. If the movie could have focused on this point rather than just informing the viewer on the artist, I think it would have been more successful.
"Valentino: The Last Emperor" is a fabulous documentary, accounting for the artist/fashion designer's last year as head of Valentino. While this film, like the former, allows the viewer to understand the importance of artist's non-traditional medium through his physical works, much insight is given to the man himself through interviews that were not solely praiseworthy. The interviews focused on the reality of working with such an influential artist: good and bad realities. Moreover, through the course of the year this film was made, the viewer also gains an understanding of a much bigger concept--the reality of art being swallowed by big business and that regardless of how sad that might be, that it is happy, that it is a celebration, because ultimately it means that the artist achieved a level of success that they strove for, and then realized it is never perfect. Matt Tyrnauer, the director of this documentary, made a film that at least strove for a realization as beautiful as the subject matter. Cheers to you, Mr. Tyrnauer and of course, Mr. Valentino.
Laura Lee
(This was written by me initially for www.meow-houston.com on February 7, 2011)
