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The script may be a mess, but to be fair to Pullman, it is nicely directed. It’s probably hard to shoot an ugly movie in gorgeous Big Sky country (Alberta stands in for Wyoming here), but vast locations like this can be greatly diminished on television. Pullman, though, eschews static shots of beautiful scenery and keeps his camera moving over his boundless outdoors settings.
Snow Falling on Cedars, then, is the story of Ishmael’s reluctant journey to become a man of compassion and fairness, as he finds himself having to decide whether the bitterness he feels over Hatsue’s rejection of him will stand in the way of correcting an injustice he is in a position to affect. It’s a very interior story, and probably not one that anyone could easily adapt for the screen.
Tobey Maguire is rapidly becoming one of my favorite young actors. His remarkably expressive face has done him great service so far with his characters, who’ve tended to be naive boys who get their eyes abruptly and unpleasantly opened, as in Ride with the Devil and Pleasantville. It remains to be seen whether he’ll be able to make the transition to more adult characters, but I’d lay odds that he’ll do just fine: The Cider House Rules is a step in that direction for him.
I have a gut feeling that The Nightmare Before Christmas may be the movie closest to Burton’s subconscious. This Edward Gorey phantasm of a film, I think, is Burton’s id come to life.
The king of 80s teen angst, John Hughes will be forever be venerated by Gen-Xers as the writer/director of our Holy Flick: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But his favorite movie with the rest of the world is probably Home Alone, which Hughes wrote. One indication, admittedly drawn from an extremely tiny sampling of moviewatchers: To this day, ten years after the release of the biggest-grossing film of 1990, my mother — who tends to refer to actors as ‘the guy from that TV show’ or ‘the one who was married to that other one in that movie’ — calls Macaulay Culkin, adoringly, ‘Home Alone.’
Maybe because A Christmas Story, based on writings by humorist Jean Shepherd, concerns itself with the universalities of childhood, at least as it existed in America in the 20th century. From the mysteries of life — like, Does a human tongue stick to a frozen flag pole? — to the ‘unthinkable disasters’ of youth that are hilarious in adult retrospect, A Christmas Story taps into the bewildered and not-so-innocent child still in all of us.
Why do otherwise rational people believe in the weirdest of things, in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary? This is the question lurking in the background of Errol Morris’s new documentary, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Powerful and disturbing, this is a startling portrait of man so blinkered by vanity that he lives in a fantasy world of his own making, rationality be damned.
And sure enough, with The Hurricane, Washington does finally join the rank of actors capable of delivering a performance that packs an emotional wallop. All it took was a role that is at least as physical as it is cerebral.
Turning a television show into a religion was an oddity, to say the least, when Star Trek fans first did so back in the 70s. Today, pop culture is just about the only touchstone Generation Xers have, so it’s perhaps not a coincidence that within the space of a year, two movies tried to sort out exactly what Star Trek means to the faithful. Trekkies and Free Enterprise couldn’t be two more different films, but each has a deep and abiding love of Star Trek at its core.
Just as those who don’t understand the appeal of Star Trek will never get it, the charm of Galaxy Quest is probably limited to those of us already within the geek realm. So, it’s one more bit of fun we’ll hog for ourselves.
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