Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts.

"Shot over 18 months, [Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts] follows the influential modern composer Philip Glass through a little more than a year in his life with a casual honesty and deftly shifting distance that flatter the viewer by not kowtowing to its subject." Bruce Bennett talks with director Scott Hicks for the New York Sun.

"Glass's status as one of America's most venerated and mocked highbrows matches gracefully with his peripatetic cultural and spiritual life; he may not define himself exclusively as a Buddhist, but his frequent self-targeted laughter and robust playfulness at physical-meditation sessions are so clearly engrained, not affected, that he often seems like a jolly, music-consumed monk," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

Updated through 4/18.

For Vadim Rizov, writing in the Voice, this is "a stupefyingly dull portrait... Things perk up briefly in a segment devoted to soundtrack work, sparked by a typically loud Errol Morris announcing, 'I think collaboration should be contentious,' and an endearingly professional, non-neurotic Woody Allen editing Cassandra's Dream. Otherwise, everyone seems to conclude that Glass is a) intensely private, or b) very interiorized, which tells us exactly nothing."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Hicks "about returning to his filmmaking roots, editing over the internet, and watching The Red Balloon at a drive-in in Kenya."

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Meanwhile, Glass's 1979 opera Satyagraha sees a new production at the Met, running through May 1. In the New York Times, Daniel J Wakin talks with Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott, artistic directors of the London-based theater and performance company Improbable, about the staging: "The dominant medium is newsprint.... 'It's an ordinary object that, when transformed, becomes magical,' Mr McDermott said. 'Ordinary simple actions, when done with commitment, become something powerful,' he said, a quality of Gandhi's idea of 'satyagraha,' a Sanskrit term that can be translated as 'truth-force' and stands for Gandhi's principle of nonviolent resistance." And there's an accompanying video.

Updates, 4/18: "First and most important among the welcome surprises in Glass is in fact Glass," writes Chris Barsanti in Film Journal International. "Glass would seem to be the kind of man to appear in starkly monochromatic outfits and pontificating about his 'method' and the artist's mission in a callow world. Instead, the portrait presented by Hicks is of a robustly normal guy who doesn't allow his decades-long pursuit of outré art and music to keep him from being human. In addition to his long avant-garde resume, he also composed the music for Candyman, after all."

In the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis finds the doc "is much like its subject: affable, quotable and emotionally guarded in the extreme."

"Intentionally or not, Scott Hicks's documentary Glass: A Portrait Of Philip In Twelve Parts makes a good companion piece to his breakthrough film, Shine, right down to the way that Philip Glass even looks a little like Shine star Geoffrey Rush," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. But "where Shine was visually beautiful and aspired to the poetic, Glass looks flat and feels scattered."

Posted by dwhudson at April 17, 2008 2:23 AM