Movies
Amistad
(DreamWorks Pictures). Steven Spielberg's eagerly awaited
docudrama about an 1839 slave-ship mutiny inspires much enthusiasm and some
disappointment. As with Schindler's List , many reviewers celebrate
Spielberg for creating a film of "emotional and moral weight" (Richard
Schickel, Time ) that awakens the public to a historical tragedy.
Benin-born model Djimon Hounsou as the lead mutineer and Anthony Hopkins as his
lawyer, former President John Quincy Adams, are singled out for praise. But
some critics complain the film is "more dutiful than dramatic" (Leah Rozen,
People ) or just "a courtroom drama of dull, soapbox ponderousness" (Owen
Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly ). (Click here for the official
site.)
Good Will Hunting
(Miramax). Critics conclude that
Wunderkind Matt Damon--the film's star and (with co-star Ben Affleck)
co-author--lives up to his hype. His screenplay, about a South Boston janitor
revealed to be a genius, is called a "wise, inviting story" (Janet Maslin, the
New York Times ). And his performance as the janitor, says the Wall
Street Journal 's Joe Morgenstern, exhibits "a coiled strength that hasn't
been seen since the young Marlon Brando." Robin Williams' turn as the savant's
shrink is said to revive his career, two weeks after it was pronounced stalled
in the reviews of Flubber . Dissenters call Good Will Hunting
"conventional" and fraught with "traditional sticky sentimentality" (Kenneth
Turan, the Los Angeles Times ). (Miramax plugs the film.)
Television
Breast Men
(HBO; Dec. 13; 9 p.m. EST/PST). Applause for this
morality tale about the inventors of the breast implant, who go from being star
surgeons in the '70s to coke heads in the '80s. "The Boogie Nights of
the fake-boob industry" (Bruce Fretts, Entertainment Weekly ). Critics
admire the show's witty satire of sleazy doctors, as well as the performances
by David Schwimmer ( Friends ) and Chris Cooper ( Lone Star ). New
York 's John Leonard gripes that Breast Men simply exploits cable
TV's independence to show gratuitous flesh: "In an exuberance meant to be
Rabelaisian, it crosses the line from peep show into pornography." (HBO plugs the show.)
Theater
The
Diary of Anne Frank
(Music Box Theatre, New York City). Critics credit
this revival of the 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play with correcting many of
the original's faults. The revival "doesn't diminish the magnitude of the
events behind it" (the New York Times ' Ben Brantley) or water down
Frank's Judaism. Both the script and 16-year-old actress Natalie Portman
( Everyone Says I Love You ) are said to render Anne Frank less of a
caricature than before. Dissenters echo Cynthia Ozick's criticism in an October
issue of The New Yorker that the play remains "infantilized,
Americanized, homogenized, [and] sentimentalized." (See the play's site.)
Opera
Amistad
(performed by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Civic Opera
House, Chicago). Composer Anthony Davis and his librettist cousin, Thulani
Davis ( X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X ), offer their rendition of the
suddenly hot slave-ship saga. Critics like the movie better. They chide the
opera for making African folk deities the major characters at the expense of
explaining the slave revolt itself. The score, which borrows from Benjamin
Britten and bebop, is called incoherent and "bland" (Paul Griffiths, the New
York Times ). "One of the biggest missed opportunities the operatic world
has seen in a while," says USA Today 's David Patrick Stearns.
Book
A
Certain Justice
, by P.D. James (Knopf). Mixed reviews for the
best-selling English crime novelist's latest whodunit. Some condemn the novel,
in which an arrogant barrister who defends rogues is murdered, for its clichéd
depiction of lawyering and its unconvincingly tidy ending. "The moral and
emotional questions she asks do not admit of such neatness," says the New
York Times Book Review 's Ben Macintyre. Others say James ascends from pulp
fiction to high art, with well-drawn characters and turns of phrase "of which
Jane Austen might have been proud" (Gerald Kaufman, the Daily
Telegraph ). (An excerpt is available at Random House's site.)
Update
A modest
rebound for John Updike's widely panned Toward the
End of Time. The New York Times Book Review declares it one of the
year's "ten best books," and Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The
New
Yorker (for which Updike often writes), calls it "the most inventive of his
myriad fiction. ... Updike's prose, as always, is distinguished by passages of
lyric beauty."
Recent
"Summary Judgment" columns
Dec.
3:
Architecture --J. Paul
Getty Museum (Los Angeles);
Theater -- The Old
Neighborhood , by David Mamet;
Movie -- Flubber ;
Movie -- Welcome to
Sarajevo ;
Television -- Public
Housing (PBS);
Book -- Release 2.0:
A Design for Living in the Digital Age , by Esther Dyson;
Photography --"Weegee's World: Life, Death, and the Human Drama"
(International Center of Photography Midtown).
Nov.
26:
Movie--
Midnight in
the Garden of Good and Evil ;
Movie -- John
Grisham's The Rainmaker ;
Movie -- Alien
Resurrection ;
Book -- Ronald
Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader , by Dinesh
D'Souza;
Theater -- Ivanov ;
Music -- Standing
Stone , by Paul McCartney.
Nov.
19:
Movie -- The
Jackal ;
Movie -- Anastasia ;
Movie -- The Sweet
Hereafter ;
Theater -- The Lion
King ;
Book -- Another
City, Not My Own , by Dominick Dunne;
Art --"Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna" (Museum of Modern
Art).
Nov.
12:
Movie -- Starship
Troopers ;
Movie -- The Wings
of the Dove ;
Movie -- Mad
City ;
Theater -- Proposal ;
Book -- The Dark
Side of Camelot, by Seymour M. Hersh ;
Book -- Alfred C.
Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, by James H. Jones ;
Book -- Joy of
Cooking: The All-Purpose Cookbook ;
Art --"The Warhol Look/Glamour Fashion Style" (Whitney Museum).
--Franklin Foer
