reviews

It is revealed in *Life, the Universe, and Douglas Adams,* the 2002 direct-to-video biography of/tribute to the writer, that the horror of getting a film made of his signature novel, *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,* was ‘the single most substantial frustration of [his] professional life.’ We can now, of course, only guess at how he would have taken to Hollywood’s adaptation of the book — Adams died suddenly and unexpectedly in May 2001 — but for those to whom the movie will be their first exposure to the man’s outrageous satire and piercing wit, *Life* is a loving and funny introduction to the man himself.

It has the veneer of significance, and that’s really all a Hollywood movie needs these days to be considered ‘serious,’ right? Everyone involved is pedigreed — director Sydney Pollack and stars Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn have all won Oscars — and they’re dishing out a high-toned film set in the hushed and somber world of international diplomacy, one that raises the spectre of Middle Eastern-style suicide bombings on streets of New York, though not in any gratuitous or *Die Hard*-y way, oh no, more in the way of a smothered nightmare that hovers on the edge of your awareness that all New Yorkers post-9/11 will recognize.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so crushingly disappointed in something I was certain was a sure bet. How could this happen? How could Eric Idle have morphed, seemingly overnight, from a satiric force of legendary and historic proportions (or, at least, from part of a satiric force of legendary and historic proportions, ie, Monty … more…

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic short story plays like an 18th-century episode of The Twilight Zone, exuding an enigmatic romanticism, in this 1980 production from PBS’s erstwhile American Short Story Collection. The sound and video are quite atrocious — near Zapruder quality, actually — but the power of the tale of forbidden love and twisted devotion shines … more…

Tragic and ironic disability. Crippling grief. Implacable personal demons. It sounds weird, but this is hilarious stuff. This impressive second feature from music-video director Michael Dowse pulses with energy and passion and the groove of the rave scene, but its affecting power is fueled by the true story of deejay Frankie Wilde, whose life of … more…

So — and this would have been around the time the 1979 *Amityville Horror* came out — there was this kid I went to elementary school with on Long Island, and he used to regale us with stories of the real Amityville Horror house, because he used to live on the same street, and this, in the annals of kiddom, was as good as having wielded a murderous axe himself.

Why did the most successful marauding army in the history of the world, the Mongols, turn away from fresh, guaranteed conquest and head for home at the height of their plundering? ‘They found out their leader died,’ high-school student Pete Winters says to his summer-school teacher, with an air of discovery that has nothing to do with the scholarly. He probably doesn’t realize it — Pete is even more sullen and withdrawn, and less self-aware, than most teenagers, though with good reason — but his insight comes from his own personal experience with spirit-crushing discouragement and despair.

If the word ‘pitch’ weren’t coincidentally associated with both football and baseball, allowing the producers of this new film to retain the title, you’d never know there was any relationship between the two films.