Behind every tortured artist is someone who has to do the housekeeping. Zachary Heinzerling's documentary about 80-year-old Japanese action painter Ushio Shinohara, "Cutie and the Boxer," centers on that very someone. In the case of Shinohara, it's his scrappy wife Noriko, an artist in her own right who forsook her own dreams to support her unruly husband. Rather than create a biography of Shinohara as he originally intended, Heinzerling explores this codependent couple's stormy relationship and fraught history of regret and disappointment. He lovingly paints Ushio and Noriko as two individuals overflowing with personality, at once enmeshed in the New York art scene and also holed up in their Brooklyn loft, toiling to make ends meet. There are plenty of tempestuous artist couples in history -- Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Ulay and Marina Abramovic -- but Ushio and Noriko never achieved that kind...
- 1/16/2014
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Thompson on Hollywood
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