Year: 2002

It makes me feel weird / Thinking about all the bad things in the world / Like puppies with broken legs / And butterflies that die / And movies starring pop queens

Hurrah for Denzel Washington. No, really. He’s perhaps the only black actor to have made the transition to color-blind Hollywood roles, but never in a movie like John Q, calculated for mass appeal, which it will almost certainly enjoy. Aimed squarely at blue-collar family guys and designed to infuriate them about their own precarious financial situations, and to give them a taste of sweet revenge to boot, this working-class anthem of a movie could easily substitute Nic or Bruce or Mel for Denzel without changing a single thing.

In 1975, Rollerball was science fiction. Today, it’s barely fiction. Substitute ‘Prozac’ for ‘soma’ and ‘Survivor’ for ‘rollerball,’ and we live in this world today. Corporations rule, executives are in charge, and movies like John McTiernan’s ‘remake’ of ‘Rollerball’ are our rollerball. Bread and circuses are back, and they are playing at a multiplex near you.

Call it Macbeth with Cheese. First-time writer/director Billy Morrissette transports Shakespeare’s Macbeth to 1970s small-town Pennsylvania, with cheeky self-awareness of how silly such a metamorphosis is, and the result is inspired. The Bard’s tale of backstabbing, betrayal, and murder now occurs over a soft-serve cone at the counter of a burger joint, where spineless, sweet-but-dumb … more…

Finally, the truth can be told. Hollywood movies — you know, the kind that are declared blockbusters a year in advance of their release — are actually written by 14- year- old boys in three hours under penalty of failing English class. And then the stories get stolen by unscrupulous movie producers. How else to … more…

Los Angeles playwright Peter McGowan (Kenneth Branagh: Love’s Labour’s Lost) doesn’t really want to kill his neighbor’s dog — he’s a suburban terrorist only in his cynical writer’s imagination. And he’s not even the misanthrope he’d like to think he is, either. Nobody does cranky better than Branagh, especially when he’s thawing into the warm … more…

Will Landon fall in love with her? Will she reveal her deep, dark secret, the one we’d guessed from the beginning but at which we will still howl with derisive laughter when she does? Will the audience survive the movie without their sides splitting? I think you already know the answers.

The key thing to remember when you’re adapting a classic novel for Hollywood is this: Take any moral complexities, any shades of gray, and make ’em black or white. You don’t want to make anyone think, after all, or make anyone uncomfortable. This is Entertainment. Fer gawd’s sake, don’t tax your audience.

With no sense of irony, no concept of subtext, nothing at all going on behind that pretty face, Gere lets his jutting square-jawness and blinking dumbfoundment stand in for Klein’s supposed grief-stricken anguish and In Search Of… befuddlement.