Pictureland

Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), already established as a kind and long-suffering sort, sits before a man on a blind date.   She offers a frank statement about growing up in New York, accepting the good of such an upbringing, acknowledging the drawbacks.  With the words barely out of her mouth, the stock asshole sitting opposite her pours out his disdain for the city as a place to raise children.   He then proceeds,  printout in hand, to take issue with Rebecca's hair color, rankled at the perceived difference to the color indicated in the profile that he's holding.  She politely points out that there really is no misrepresentation, but he will have none if it.  That rencontre, early in Nicole Holofcener's  Please Give, is reminiscent of  a scene in  her 2001 film,  Lovely and Amazing , the one in which the Emily Mortimer character, Elizabeth, asks the man with whom she's sl...

"Is it real, or a hoax?" goes the refrain, in various forms, from coast to coast.   The legendary street artist Banksy is credited as the director of "the world's first street art disaster movie."   To dwell too much on the unknown identity of Banksy in pursuance of his work, whether on the side of a bulding or what's happily filling all too few movie screens in this country, is to miss the point.   Read the surface of it how you will,  Exit Through the Gift Shop  is one of the smartest, funniest films of the year. For all its plot convolutions, Exit Through the Gift Shop  is in some ways a conventional documentary about an unconventional subject.   It's got an actor narrator, a well modulated soundtrack (as the picture above indicates, Bansky has appropriated Richard Hawley's "Tonight The Streets Are Ours" in more ways than one; Hawley's lovely carousel of a tune opens and closes the film) and some text at the end to let us know wha...