Among The Holiday Glut, 3 Movies About The Creative Life
It's movie-binge time — that month-long surge of Oscar hopefuls and would-be blockbusters Hollywood always winds up the year with. On All Things Considered, I talked about some of the big tent-pole pictures: Anchorman 2, The Wolf of Wall Street, the second Hobbit installment and so on.
But here, let's winnow the list down a bit to three films you might want to keep an eye out for if you're intrigued by the artistic process — how artists think and work.
Start with a terrific documentary called Six By Sondheim, in which the grand master of the American musical theater talks about the art of making art as it applies to his own work. James Lapine, who directed the Broadway productions of Stephen Sondheim's Passion, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, has assembled archival footage of the composer-lyricist explaining what he does and why, blending it with six of his songs to create a two-hour tour-de-force that's both a biographical sketch and a kind of master class in musical composition. Opens in New York Dec. 5, then screens on HBO Dec. 9.