THIS WEEK IN THEATRES...
* Righteous Kill, in which a hack director thinks having Al Pacino and Robert De Niro is enough. Think again!
* The Women, Diane English's attempt to set feminism back to where it was 50 years before George Cukor made the 1939 film she's so badly eviscerating.
This Women remake is a real disappointment. It's hard to fathom just what they were thinking in so drastically defanging the original material. Cukor's film had a sense of playfulness that is all-too absent in filmmaking today. Can you even imagine a stuffy, self-important production like this Diane English film having an opening credits sequence like the one in Cukor's version? Each character/actress is represented by a different animal, including many types of cats and birds. In the stills I'm showing, an angry black cat appears, and then fades into the face of Rosalind Russell. Diane English would have Meg Ryan and Annette Bening show up as two pure white kittens cleaning each other's fur.
Rosalind Russell is reason #1 for skipping the remake and go out and renting the DVD of the original
. Her outlandish outfits, her animated gesturing, and her hunched, gawky posture make for an hilarious physical performance. Her posture alone should have won a special achievement Oscar of some kind. Russell also shows off that fast-talking verbal dexterity that would make her such a delight in His Girl Friday. Compare those two performances, shot just a year apart, and you'll see what a talented actress she was. The two roles are totally different, both brimming with confidence and yet diametrically opposed in how that confidence is expressed, you'd almost not realize it's the same woman if you didn't check the credits.
THIS WEEK IN DVD REVIEWS...
* High School Flashback Collection (Sixteen Candles/The Breakfast Club/Weird Science), a new collection of three of John Hughes' earliest teen flicks.
* The Mindscape of Alan Moore, a documentary about the influential comic book writer.
Current Soundtrack: The Supremes, The Supremes: Box Set (Disc 2)
Current Mood:
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All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich
1 comment:
I know someone who worked on Righteous Kill, and he's been warning me off it for like, a year - to be prepared for it to suck. He says Avnet is a hack who has no idea what he's doing, and that DeNiro and Pacino were totally mailing it in.
On the plus side (from a working environment, at least), he said Leguizamo and Wahlberg were hilarious, constantly cutting up on the set. And Carla Gugino was smoking hot (duh) but also very sweet.
-jim d.
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