Reviews

This was totally disappointing. The apparently true story offered every opportunity to make a great movie and instead we ended up with this mess.

The relationships just don't work. Father/son, boy/girl, White/Hispanic- it just doesn't matter, everyone of them comes off as written rather than realistic.

There are several sentimental "odes to wine" scenes that are completely unnecessary and obnoxious.

Save your money and wait for the DVD where you can fast forward through much of it and still enjoy the interesting story of how, where, and when California wine became the equal of French wine.

We attended as a middle age couple and our teenage son. None of us enjoyed the movie much at all and we probably would have walked out if we had communicated better in the theater about how hard it was to sit through.

Unlike previous Pixar films, which we have all enjoyed immensely, this was an extremely linear and slow moving story. There was little of the two levels of story for young and old that you see in other Pixar stories.

The small children all around us in the theater seemed as bored by it all as we were.

Particularly distracting was the one human character. It offended my animation sensibility for him to appear when that was totally unnecessary.

Oh well, I've got to get back to my cupcake in a cup.

Truly a waste of time.

I've taken acid trips that made a lot more sense than this film.

The film spends 135 minutes to make its obvious point. I stood up four separate times thinking the credits were about to roll before it got to the actual ending.

Parts of it are pseudo-documentary, parts are narrated, parts have a story line, parts flash forward, parts flash backward, points of view change constantly, etc. The film maker is trying so hard to be cool that he will leave most of the audience absolutely cold.

This film is the antithesis of Bob Dylan.

This is an exceptional movie that provides the evidence and leaves it to each viewer to decide the core mystery.

Does 4 year old Marla Olmstead paint her own modern art or is she being used by the adults around her? The documentary benefits from having begun before the 60 Minutes coverage, when the authenticity of Marla's work is unquestioned. The Olmsteads are a beautiful and loving family with two marvelous kids.

The filmmaker does a great job taking us inside their world as fame descends upon Marla. Then things really heat up when the 60 Minutes piece breaks- and the cameras are rolling on the parents as it airs.

The film does not decide for you but presents the evidence evenly, making it for me one of the most entertaining recent films.

My guess of who's really painting- The mother seems too sincere to be lying but dad appears a little shifty, and they say they work opposing shifts. The guy I suspect is really doctoring the paintings from childish to MOMA quality is the art gallery owner. There is a scene showing him doing hyper-realistic painting and he is clearly a great artist, but it also seems he may have a chip on his shoulder that he has not been recognized as a talent. They say in the movie that it's always the two men against the mother when it comes to making decisions about Marla's career, so I suspect these two are working together for the substantial financial rewards, while making it easy and technically true for Dad to say that he doesn't do the painting.

It will be interesting to see how Marla progresses artistically as she gets older and is no longer under her parent's or art dealer's control. She is certainly an engaging young girl and her story in fifteen years is potentially the subject of another film.

No matter who you choose to believe, this documentary is top notch.

Maybe I fell asleep and missed the good parts because I was so bored but I cannot comprehend how anyone could claim this is a good movie let alone a great movie.

The film just violates most of the rules of common sense. The male leads story arc is outrageously unrealistic. Also incredibly unreal is the resolution of the major plot point. Very few of the relationships in the film come off as believable- the fact that we are watching a scripted drama rather than real life is ever present.

This is a film about good people making good choices- it's just not close enough to any form of reality to take seriously and get involved with.

This is an interesting movie but its message is fundamentally flawed. The filmmakers use scenes of a few very dedicated Pentecostal Fundamentalist families to leave the impression on the viewer that they have just seen a representative sample of the 80 million or so Americans who self identify as Evangelicals. Statistics about Evangelicals are occasionally flashed on screen as we watch the Pentecostal Fundametalists, in an apparent effort to equate the two groups.

As an Evangelical, the movie opened my eyes to how many Americans may view us and our perceived political movement.

There was a great deal of focus in the movie on "soldiers" and "warfare", while Jesus Camp was being portrayed on screen as a Christian equivalent of Islamic madrassas. To the non-Evangelical this can easily appear to be a scary thing. The huge difference is that these sort of camps (not just the one in the movie but what I have personally attended), don't feature AK-47's, hand grenades, or strap on suicide bombs. The children are being trained to engage in spiritual warfare, not physical warfare- and the movie fails to make that clear.

Do they go too far with their indoctrination of the children? That is a legitimate question but I don't know that the film brings anything new to the table. Children become just as enthralled and emotional about a wide variety of things as these children are about Jesus. Regardless of their indoctrination, each will still have to make a personal choice on following Jesus when they get to an appropriate age- and none of the featured children seem to be mature enough to have made that decision yet.

So the real question here to me is- should parents be allowed to subject their children to such indoctrination? If you believe in freedom, you've got to say yes. The indoctrination going on in the film may be different in content but it is not different in form from any number of competing ideologies that children are exposed to, and yes, indoctrinated into every day.