I have claimed in several of my reviews that all I, or anyone can do when confronted with a movie is to speak of its competence and our own reactions to it, which has almost nothing to do with the movie's excellence. If my opinion is widely held, then the movie, being an artform that cultivates a large audience, is held to be good; if not, not. That doesn't apply to fine art.
Given my middle-class, old-fashioned tastes, it seems unlikely that I enjoy Christo's work. His thesis is that if you wrap something in fabric, it will alter your perception of it. Having grown up in an era when a lot of people got furniture which they wrapped in plastic or Scotchguarded it lest it get dirty, my reaction to Christo's early works like "Wrapped Chairs" is that it all seemed rather pointless, like Duchamp presenting a toilet as an original work of art. Shouldn't the credit go to American Standard? Likewise, "Wrapped Chairs" seems to owe more to my aunt Selma's desire not to have to have the parlor sofa cleaned six times a year than to an original artistic impulse.
Continuing this clearly bourgeois and even Philistine analysis, what is Christo's Valley Curtain but the same impulse writ ever larger? True, the men who do the labor getting it up are impressed. One notes that Christo is an educated man. Another that he would never have thought of it himself. Pardon me, if I am not impressed by something which stood for 28 hours.
It's a competently made film.
