The Cool School.

"In the 50s and 60s, Los Angeles transformed itself from an artistic wasteland into a burgeoning mecca of modern art, thereby confirming there was more to the world of painting, sculpture, and photography than what was happening in Paris and New York," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "With narration from Jeff Bridges, Morgan Neville's The Cool School details this vital period of creativity, in which a group of young artists championed by curator Walter Hopps at his famous Ferus gallery (1957 - 1966) made great strides in the areas of abstract expressionism and assemblage."

Nathan Lee, in one of his last reviews for the Voice, finds the doc "does an ace job at tracking down forgotten figures and burgeoning bohemias even as it perpetuates some of the conventional disparagements and outmoded narratives of mid-century La La Land.... All told, and well told, this is essential history."

Updated through 3/28.

"The Cool School is one of a subset of documentary biographies that might best be called 'Scenes of Yesteryear,'" suggests Michael Joshua Rowin in indieWIRE. "Like the recent Weather Underground, Commune and American Hardcore - whose respective subjects include radical terrorists, hippie collectives, and indigenous, anticommercial punk rock - The Cool School weaves testimony from participants of a faded fringe movement with footage from its heyday to take stock of the legacy of the marginal subculture in question.... As 'Scenes of Yesteryear' documentaries go it does right by its subject, providing an illuminating primer on a lesser-known strand of America's eruptive postwar art movement, even as it doesn't do much aesthetically to distinguish itself from the pack."

Opens at New York's Cinema Village on Friday.

Online viewing tip. Sujewa Ekanayake's found what seems to be a demo.

Updates, 3/28: "It's an old story in some ways, a myth-making tale of a group of post-World War II aesthetic adventurers who, working together and alone, created an exciting American moment," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Given the lingering prejudice of some East Coasters and the inferiority complex of select West Coasters, though, it's also a story that deserves to be told often and as loudly as possible."

"The film's direct chronology and straightforward narration (by Jeff Bridges) isn't as deliberately arty as its subjects, but it's also looser and more fun than a Ken Burns exhumation would be," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "Expert witnesses (including the painter and Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens), survivors ([Billy Al] Bengston), second-wave inheritors (Ed Ruscha), celebrity enthusiasts (Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell), and various ex-wives weigh in with testimonies, and generous stock footage does the rest."

"Neville's film shows, in effect, how deliberate the founding of an art movement can be," writes James Hughes for Stop Smiling. "But also how thrilling it is for those at the eye of the storm."

Posted by dwhudson at March 26, 2008 11:49 AM