Pollock
Pollock
R | 06 September 2000 (USA)
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In August of 1949, Life Magazine ran a banner headline that begged the question: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The film is a look back into the life of an extraordinary man, a man who has fittingly been called "an artist dedicated to concealment, a celebrity who nobody knew." As he struggled with self-doubt, engaging in a lonely tug-of-war between needing to express himself and wanting to shut the world out, Pollock began a downward spiral.

Reviews
GazerRise

Fantastic!

Lightdeossk

Captivating movie !

Rexanne

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

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Geraldine

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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room102

Watching "Big Eyes (2014)" really made me want to see a GOOD biography movie about a painter. This is the 3rd or 4th I'm watching this movie (my first watch was at the cinema).This movie is so much better than "Big Eyes" - everything about it is great: Direction (Ed Harris himself), cinematography, score, writing. The entire cast is wonderful, especially Ed Harris - he's just excellent and all the scenes of him painting are very realistic (it's obvious he studied Pollock back and forth) - although he was only nominated for an Oscar and Marcia Gay Harden actually won one.I really like the direction/writing/acting approach of everything presented very realistically and natural, like people really act - there's no smooch and people smiling all the time, like you usually see in movies. Everything is straight forward and real. It's pretty noticeable in Marcia Gay Harden's character (acting and speech). Pollock is a broken character, with lots of damages, problems and imperfections - very far from the usual Hollywood presentation.I like the way they present Pollock as a passive character and Lee Krasner as the active of the two, doing all the decisions, pushing Pollock forward without hurting her own ego. If you want an example of a strong female character in a movie, she's a good example - I hate how people throw this term for just about any silly/weak/meaningless female character in other movies.The last part of the movie is a bit weak, but other than that it's great.This movie is one - if not THE - best movie biographies I've seen about a painter.

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ursulahemard

Brilliant! Ed Harris is not only interpreting Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956).......he IS Pollock! The beginning might be a bit foggy for the uninitiated, but then again, if you chose to watch this movie you already know a bit about the artist. Shows the complex, bio-polar and alcoholic personality of the artist without being vulgar. We learn about his relationships, family and artistic development chronologically. We discover how he searched for a distinguished style and his famous Dripping-Technique. Excellent faithful reconstructions of real life events, interviews and photographs of which we all know are conserved on film (even on YouTube!). All other cast framed Harris' work wonderfully, especially Marcia Hayden as Lee Krasner, Pollock's artist wife. Historically and Biographically totally accurate.Watchable with Teenagers. Short, (without being over pretentious) a very good biopic: an instructive BIOgraphy within a very well acted moving PICture.(I only take off one * for the sometimes abrupt editing)

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maryszd

I always try to catch this film when it's on TV, but I always stop watching before its terrible ending. Jackson Pollock was a great artist, thanks in no small part to his shrewd wife, Lee Krasner. She was the intermediary between this disturbed and ultimately psychotic man and the sophisticated New York art world that never knew quite what to make of him. Compared to today, the postwar New York art scene looks quaintly innocent. All it took was some pontificating by Clement Greenberg and a spread in Life magazine to make Pollock's career. Ed Harris plays Pollock well, and the scenes where he actually paints are fascinating. The film also does a does a good job of showing how artists actually lived in fifties in New York. By today's standards, it was a grubby life in dilapidated walk-ups painted in the harsh, cheap white paint favored by cheap landlords. But it was possible to be poor and still live in Manhattan. In a way, Krasner did her job too well. Pollock was emotionally unprepared for his fame and it sent him (and ultimately poor, innocent Edith Metzger who had the bad luck to be in his car at the wrong time) over the deep end. Pollock is an honest movie that is obviously a labor of love on the part of director Harris and the actors whose performances are excellent.

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secondtake

Pollock (2000)There's no question this is a well made film, and based pretty much on truth, and an interesting truth--the life of a great Abstract Expressionist. Some would say the greatest of them all.For myself, this isn't enough, and I know this is me. I'm an art critic and professor of Art in my real life, and I'm never very patient with movies about artists. The reason isn't that there are inaccuracies, but that there is a subtle or not-subtle goal of aggrandizing the subject. This reaches a beautiful but, again, romanticized, peak when Pollock makes his famous break into true gestural, raw work in a large commissioned piece for Peggy Guggenheim (who is portrayed, oddly, as a shy and dull sort, which I've never pictured). Then later he makes his drip works. And then he dies, again over dramatized and made aesthetic, as tragic and ugly as it had to have been in life.If you want to really get into Pollock's head, especially if you aren't already a fan (I love Pollock's work), this is a convincing movie. At the helm as both director and playing the artist is Ed Harris. He is especially believable as a painter, which is something of an important point. This isn't like those movies about musicians where the actor is clearly not playing. Harris actually paints the darned thing, the big masterpiece, on the cusp of the drip works. I don't know if Harris was drinking, too, but he's a good drunk, and of course Pollock was a better drinker than a painter, even.It's a cheap shot to say a movie could have been shorter, but this one sure would have propelled better with less atmosphere, less filler that is meant to create his life but is interesting only as an illustration of historical facts. It wore me thin for those reasons. Again, it might be a matter of how much you can get sucked into the given drama that is Jackson Pollock's life. It was quite a life, crude, untempered, brave, and immensely connected to what matters as an artist.

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