Iris
Director: Albert Maysles
Year Released: 2014
Rating: 2.0
Maysles offers up this pat-on-the-back to the unique fashion maven Iris Apfel, whose eccentric style and impressive collection of clothes and jewelry have made her an inspiration to many. It's important that Maysles provides her credentials - she's not just a lady who wears loads of large bracelets and outfits containing wild colors, she's also an accomplished interior decorator who, along with her husband Carl, started a successful textile firm and did work in the White House for several Presidents. The Maysles brothers were no strangers to documenting strange older women (they made Grey Gardens), but it also feels like Albert filming a lady friend as a favor to her: you won't be getting any excessive-consumerism-as-a-cover-for-sadness side commentary in here. Or maybe I'm just being nitpicky (as usual), and I do hope I'm as passionate about art if/when I enter my 90's (though the booze and late, late nights will probably do me in by then)....
