Letters to the Editor
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Claire Danes
I have always thought that Claire Danes would be a star since her mesmerising performance in Romeo + Juliet. I think the best thing she did was take two or three years off to go to college before coming back on screen. Her gawkiness had become something almost sensual, and her talent had matured. I am looking forward to seeing her in Matthew Vaughan's Stardust - she should make the perfect fallen star.
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All About Oscar
Hollywood's rolling out their Oscar fodder in June so that, come awards season, the films will be long gone from the theaters and their DVDs will have already been released into the marketplace for several months, with the majority of their sales behind them. That frees the studios to carpetbomb voters with free screener DVDs (a la Crash, which went to every actor, director, writer, maid and gardener in Los Angeles) without having to worry about all those freebies depressing DVD sales or spawning pirated copies (especially for films still in the theaters).
Now they can all play the Let's Buy An Oscar game pioneered by Miramax with Shakespeare In Love.
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Please, people have been buying and manipulating Oscars for decades...
...or do you think Around the World in 80 Days or The Greatest Show on Earth won for merit? While Miramax became overly aggressive, in the early 90s they did a lot of good in opening up the major awards to smaller pictures outside of the studio orbit.
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Vanessa Redgrave?
Does the movie have communist children throwing rocks at imperialist tanks? Does she get to wear a black beret and scream about the violent overthrow of the government? I'm pretty sure putting Ms. Redgrave in a movie about blueblood Newporters is some kind of joke on the audience.
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Doctor Strange? Swamp Thing? Your ship came in decades ago!
There was a 1978 TV-movie, Doctor Strange, that portrayed a sophisticated, business-suit-wearing Steven Strange, lured into the world of magic, where he had to face down Morgan LeFay (Jessica Walter). The angst and pain of the drunken, crippled surgeon becoming Sorcerer Supreme was removed for TV-movie quickness, as was the huge gay cape and the Eye of Agomotto.
As for Swamp Thing, that was 1982, and the most elaborate special effect was Adrienne Barbeau. There was also a brief TV series shot at Universal Studios Florida. Sorry if you were looking for Alan Moore's introverted, over-literate version, but even Alan Moore doesn't like movies made from his material. (He hated V for Vendetta, for God's sake. He, not Jim Carrey, should have played The Grinch.)
I could complain, Mr. O'Hehir, that you didn't bother using IMDB to look up these things as you wrote about it, but I've been blamed for doing the same thing when I write. So we're both equally guilty of that.
However, you should realize that both of the above somewhat-campy productions are much more available, on DVD or even VHS, than the elite, Jamaican and French movies you mentioned in this column. Unless someone steals them through various electronic means, or waits for DVD's to be made (and hopefully has a region-free DVD player to watch them with, if they're not made for the American market) there's no way most of us will ever, ever, EVER see these films.
I'm not blaming you for this. But frankly, I think you should nag all those multi-cinema theatre chains for not setting an auditorium aside for these films. How long do they have to keep extra theatres aside for something like Evan Almighty that no one is seeing?
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Slapping The Aid Workers
Gee, do you want to slap all sex tourists, or just the female ones?
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Thank goodness 1408 is still out...
>"Evening" feels like one of those devil's-candy productions that aim to bring artistry to a large audience, specifically a large audience of adult women who don't often go to the movies.<
And they think stuff like _this_ will do the trick? I was hard-pressed to stay awake through EVENING'S trailer. (Wondering why obvious Oscar-bait like this was out now helped...:).) FWIW, there are more examples of "adult" counterprogramming movies doing well in summer than were listed in this article--THE NOTEBOOK and HOPE FLOATS, to name a few...
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Susan Minot
I haven't read this novel by Minot either, but I have read another of her works, Folly. It was terrible. It sounds a lot like the way you described t his movie---as Gertrude Stein once said "There is no there there." The book was basically contentless--posturing and quasi-intellectual, but certainly not interesting or enjoyable. I'll skip this movie--but I enjoyed the review. Made me laugh several times!
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Dude, of course I remember those movies
I definitely saw both John Carpenter's 1982 movie of Swamp Thing and that TV Doctor Strange movie. In context, I thought it was clear that I was talking about the 21st century zillion-dollar versions. The fact that there have been numerous previous films based on Superman, Batman and Spider-Man comics did not seem to inhibit the production, or popularity, of these behemoth spectacles whose budgets rival the GNP of Slovenia.
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favorite phrase
"eating the tasteful furniture entire "
So delicious. Thanks.
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No hype
Many years ago I stopped reading movie reviews/critiques. It was partly to do with some of the pompous, condescending tones movie reviewers/critics had starting taking on, as if the those of us who were not the reviewer/critic needed a full re-education in modernism, post-modernism, structuralism, plus a variety of other -isms as well as having seen every French and Japanese movie ever conceived in order to even come close to knowing whether what we were watching was good or bad.
I am just a girl who likes a good read and a good movie and occasionally the two combine in a film like Evening. After having just read this "review" (having already seen the film thankfully) it has confirmed for me that movie reviewers/critics are about as useful as one of those long plastic arm things being sold as a means to throw a ball for one's dog. If you have an arm you probably don't need one, and if you don't have an arm you probably can't use one!!!
The problem is our desire to share our opinions (as I am mine right now) and to show off our smarts, it has nothing to do with the movie or even more importantly our enjoyment of the movie.
My tactic is to go to movies I know absolutely nothing about and thus far my movie-going experience has been far more pleasurable, far more entertaining, far more enjoyable. Don't believe the hype, don't read the hype, don't listen to the hype, then go with your girlfriend to see Hot Fuzz (most FUN I've had at a movie in years, had no idea what we were getting into) or take your kids to see Fantastic Four and walk out happy,(there's nothing like a cinema image looking down on our earth from the stars to put a spring in the step of an eight-year-old zoned out on Super Mario Bros!!) or go to see Evening and just immerse yourself in the good old-fashioned wonder of movie-making and leave the critics out of it!!