Tim's Vermeer

I have a movie I want to recommend to you. That in itself is pretty unusual, I know. I don't watch a lot of movies and the need to recommend one happens even less. A friend suggested that J. and I might like this one, so we ordered it from Netflix and sat down and watched it last night. Really the only reason we sat down and watched it is that A. needs a movie to arrive that goes with her Economics class and it can't come until we send something back. We were told we had to watch it so this could happen. I'm glad we did.

The movie is Tim's Vermeer and is a production of Penn and Teller, with whom he (Tim of the movie) is friends. The premise is that there is a group of people who believe that Vermeer used optics of some sort or another to enable him to create his paintings. So Tim becomes fascinated with this idea and as he thinks about it, decides that the way Vermeer actually did it was a combination of a lens and a mirror, which makes the process one that just about anyone could do. To prove this, he sets out to paint a Vermeer, specifically, "The Music Lesson". 

This image is actually the painting that Tim painted and not Vermeer's. Tim is not a painter and had held a paintbrush just once in his life before he started this project. It was really fascinating to watch. J. and I were pretty transfixed by the whole thing... along with thinking, "Boy, this is someone with way too much time on his hands."

If you are studying the Renaissance, it would be a great film to go along with it, but it is also interesting to watch just because. There are a couple brief instances of language, but given the fact that Penn Jillette was involved it's pretty squeaky clean despite it's PG-13 rating. I would say anyone late grade school and up would find it interesting. Of course P.'s reaction to it was, "It's about a guy who spent six years painting a picture that was already painted."