Monday, March 26, 2012

Stolen

I watched a documentary called Stolen last night, which was about the 1990 theft of several paintings from the Gardner Museum in Boston, MA.  I first heard about this heist a few years ago when I came across a book about it.  Sadly, I never got around to reading the book but was excited to see this documentary pop up in our Netflix recommendations.

Sadly, I watched Stolen and was terribly disappointed with it.  It claims to shed some light on this case but instead, it wanders around aimlessly.  Lots of title cards and "artistic" shots that don't make any sense.  And then there's one part where they talk about Girl with the Pearl Earring, a painting which isn't even in the museum, and talk to the author of the book Girl with the Pearl Earring.  Towards the end of the movie, they talk to a security guard about why he took a job at the museum.  I looked at how much time was left at this point and there were like 5 minutes remaining.  It was at this point I realized I'd wasted 84 minutes of my life.  Hopefully I can find that book again because the actual heist and investigation sounds interesting but holy crap, I hope Rebecca Dreyfus has figured out how to make an interesting documentary in the years since.

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