JUST MESSING AROUND A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2001 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): **
A 32-year-old painter, Edward (Tonio Arango), is JUST MESSING AROUND. He never finishes a painting, preferring instead to continually paint over his works. A consummate dilettante, he's never quite satisfied with anything.
This constant recycling of art works is turned into a form of storytelling by the filmmaker. Edward likes to paint life as he imagines and feels it. When his beautiful model, Hanna (Alexandra Maria Lara), keeps making unwanted overtures towards him -- he doesn't date people from work -- he envisions her 4 inches tall, smothering his face in a grip like a creature from ALIENS. The movie shows us his successive painting variations in stop-action animation which gives his images a certain life of their own. I must admit that I kept wishing that he was a more interesting artist since we have to see so much of his work.
The problem with movie, written and directed by Jochen Kuhn, is that, much like Edward's pictures, Kuhn never finishes anything. Everything is surface gloss, and none of the characters are ever defined well enough to care about.
Edward doesn't need to sell his works because he has a benefactor, Poser (Maximilian Schell), a wealthy art dealer and the Minister of Art. Schell doesn't lend much to the movie other than the marquee value of his name. His performance is as just as weak as the other actors. Poser, who has a definite position of power in the art world, boasts, "If I tell people it's good, they agree." He derives his income from secretly commissioned forgeries of great paintings, which he auctions off as the real McCoys. "I help to ease the cultural inferiority of the wealthy," he brags. "Everyone gets the fake they need."
Much is made of the silliness of what passes for art. One "artist" sells 4 plastic pots holding plastic tulips. Another "artist" uses toilet paper, teddy bears and garden gnomes in her works, which are quickly snapped up as wise financial investments.
Most of the movie, however, consists of Edward's trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. Although it seems to take forever, his indecision does finally get resolved in a cute way that would work great in a brief epilogue. Instead, it is drawn out into a long last act, thereby destroying almost all of its impact. This is a movie that is definitely JUST MESSING AROUND.
JUST MESSING AROUND (FISIMATENTEN) runs a long 1:37. The film is in German with English subtitles. It is not rated by the MPAA but would be an R for nudity and some language. It would be fine for most teenagers.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
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