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For a movie written by Joe Eszterhas (who also wrote Showgirls, among other travesties), Telling Lies in America is a surprisingly heartfelt coming-of-age story. It’s actually Eszterhas’s own coming-of-age story (it’s semiautobiographical, anyway), and it makes a start on explaining this maddening Hollywood personality.
I could reduce the film to How Green Was My Valley meets Dead Poets Society, but that would be terribly unfair. For woven in with the simple story are subtle examinations of human desperation, perseverance, and imagination; a tender exploration of a rocky father/son relationship; complex characterizations; and wonderful performances.
But like many men who do great things using personality traits that would be drawbacks in lesser men, Patton’s idiosyncrasies eventually turn around and bite him. He’s tolerated only as long as he gets results — and good publicity. Patton is a spectacular and unvarnished look at a man who thrives in war while also sowing the seeds of his own downfall.
From my perspective thirty years on, I can only guess that it was Midnight Cowboy’s shock value at the time of its original release that created its reputation as a ‘great film.’
Charles Dickens’s mostly gloomy Oliver Twist set to music is no sillier than the French tragedy Les Miserables recast as an English-language opera, and it works just as well — that is to say, very well indeed.
Maybe it’s an indication of some slight social progress, or just a marker of how fine a film this is, that In the Heat of the Night also works as a crime-fighting story in a tradition as old as the Sherlock Holmes tales and as new as The X-Files.
A Man for All Seasons is a handsome production. In other words, it is staid, stern, plodding, and precise, with about as much passion as your 11th-grade history textbook.
How can you tell The Sound of Music is a fantasy? Forget that it’s based on a true story. The fantasy tip-off is this: Julie Andrews plays a nun. The radiant and sweetly sexy Andrews, not that she isn’t delightful in the role, is about as believable as a nun as, say, Mel Gibson would be as the Pope.
My Fair Lady — another musical from Gigi creators Lerner and Loewe — is a charming and amusing satire on the absurdity of rigid class distinctions such as were to be found in turn-of-the-century London.
I was dreading seeing There’s Something About Mary. The last movie from Bobby and Peter Farrelly, Dumb and Dumber, was the first and so far only movie I have ever seriously considered walking out of (I like to give a movie a chance, though, and so I persevered, to my detriment). I could tell from the previews that Mary was just not to my taste. And finally, a dear friend of mine and survivor of a screening of Mary pleaded with me to just put down the video and step away.
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