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New York Times: One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story, Painting His Fears (8/15/08)
By Nathan Lee

For the first 50 years of his life, Albert Wagner led an unexceptional, if rather disreputable, existence. He put together a living in a working-class neighborhood of Cleveland, drank to excess and womanized with abandon, siring 16 children with his wife and several more with two mistresses.

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the Village Voice: One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story (8/12/08)
By Jim Ridley

A bowling ball's black kitty face busting out of a white bag: Does this beguilingly simple sculpture evoke transcendence—a message that the least among us can define his own destiny—or unconsciously expose a psyche-deep racial inferiority complex? In profiling the late African-American outsider artist Reverend Albert Wagner, who picked up a brush at age 50 and began to atone obsessively for past sins, filmmaker Thomas G. Miller answers "maybe" to both in this compellingly ambivalent portrait, which explores a taboo subject (racial divides in the viewing and collecting of art) with irresolvable complexity.

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News Blaze: One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story Film Review (8/11/08)
By Kam Williams

Albert Wagner (1924-2006) freely acknowledges that he frittered away his first half-century on Earth chasing skirts to the point that his wanton ways left him on the brink of ruin. A slave to wine and women, he fathered 20 children between his wife and his mistresses.

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Entertainment Weekly: Movie Review
By Lisa Schwarzbaum

With One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story and a subject this colorful, all a nonfiction filmmaker has to do is get out of the way. Wagner was a gambling, boozing badass with a slew of kids by three women when, at the age of 50, he found salvation through a paintbrush: Over the next 30 years, his astonishing creative output brought him fame — and spiritual solace. Internalized racism is the pilot light heating his often autobiographical works, and Thomas G. Miller's roughly cobbled film is strongest when the subject of race is right in the viewer's face.

Notes from the CIFF: Review of "One Bad Cat" (3/15/08)

An intertwined story of debauchery and redemption, One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story candidly documents the life and art of Cleveland outsider artist Albert Wagner (1924-2006). Wagner, born in Arkansas, brought his family north to Cleveland in 1941. Shortly thereafter, he fell in love and married his wife, Magnolia, but lived a life of wine and women until the age of 50 when the Reverend was called by God to help bring salvation to him and others through painting.

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In Person with Filmmaker Thomas Miller (3/13/08)

Cleveland native Thomas G. Miller's documentary, One Bad Cat: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story, is one of 240 films being screened this year at the Cleveland International Film Festival. I met with Miller in the hospitality lounge at the festival. He discussed his views on Albert Wagner, making this movie, and the state of documentary film in general.

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One Bad Cat and Another World (3/13/08)

Today Dee enters the world of the late folk artist Reverend Albert Wagner, as she talks with the principals behind the documentary about his life - One Bad Cat - onscreen at the Cleveland International Film Festival. Plus, she takes a retreat in the Ozarks with writer William Claassen as he shares the story about his new memoir Another World.

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Good Company wkyc.com Interview (3/11/08)


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Cleveland Jewish News (3/11/08)

Film by former Clevelanders shows transformative power of art
BY: SUSAN H. KAHN Assistant Editor

Racism, ego and lust brought Albert Wagner to the brink of ruin.

The African-American family man who once owned his own moving company was ruined by his weakness for alcohol and sex. Briefly jailed at age 50, he was at a turning point, wondering how he would lead the rest of his life. He turned to God, who he says called him to use his artistic talent to fight his demons and inspire others to live better lives.
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Santa Barbara Independent (1/31/08)

ONE BAD CAT: The Reverend Albert Wagner Story is filmmaker Thomas G. Miller's account of the story, deftly conveyed through personal anecdotes and footage from the last stretch of Wagner's life. But mostly, and wisely, the film tells Wagner's story through the artist's overflowing bounty of art, full of sex, youthful nostalgia, racial tensions, and religious messages...The film is an engaging portrait in the tricky genre of films about artists. It effectively pulls us into the experience of the artist and the African-American male, behind the mountain of intuitive imagery created during Wagner's 30-year outpouring.


News-Press TV (1/28/08)


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The City Paper-Nashville (4/18/08)

Sure to be among the most discussed and debated entries in the entire festival, this film by Thomas G. Miller examines former alcoholic-and carouser-turned painter and minister the Rev. Albert Wagner.  Miller's subject was black culture, and the already potentially incendiary notion of a white man chronicling the black experience gets even more dicey when the portraits show shots of black men raping white women alongside depictions of lynchings.  Delroy Lindo's narration adds one more touch to an explosive, yet also important work.


 

 

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