Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Flan Kittredge: This is what I dreamt. I didn't dream, so much as realize this. I feel so close to the paintings. I'm not just selling, like, pieces of meat. I remembered why I loved paintings in the first place, what got me into this. I thought... dreamt... remembered... how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then, one day, he loses it. Loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting. I remembered asking my kids' second-grade teacher: 'Why are all your students geniuses? Look at the first grade - blotches of green and black. The third grade - camouflage. But your grade, the second grade, Matisses, every one. You've made my child a Matisse. Let me study with you. Let me into the second grade. What is your secret?' 'I don't have any secret. I just know when to take their drawings away from them.' 'I dreamt of colour. I dreamt of our son's pink shirt. I dreamt of pinks and yellows. And the new Van Gogh the Museum of Modern Art got. And the Irises that sold for $53.5 million. And, wishing a Van Gogh was mine, I looked at my English hand-lasted shoes, and thought of Van Gogh's tragic shoes, and remembered me as I was-a painter losing a painting.'

I talk often about how Stockard Channing's performance in this film is one of my all-time favorites, and yet I don't give nearly enough lip service to how spectacularly good Donald Sutherland -- who is celebrating his 88th birthday today -- is opposite her. He's the control to her chaos, the control to her chaos, and we like, we like. In all seriousness Sutherland is one of the greatest living actors we have and he hasn't gotten nearly enough praise for it, so take a moment out of your day to praise him. A gold-star MNPP fave!