Death
Sonny
Bono (1935-1998). After his death in a skiing accident, the
pop-singer-turned-congressman is elevated from a "hen-pecked, dim bulb" (Jill
Lawrence, USA Today ) to "a symbol of the American capacity for
reinvention" ( Newsweek ). Many critics conclude that Bono was not as
buffoonish as his public image, which they claim he self-consciously cultivated
to advance his career. They judge him an underappreciated songwriter and say
his lasting legacy will be The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour , "one of the
first to slickly package the counterculture for mass consumption" (Albert Kim,
Entertainment Weekly ).
Books
A
Prayer for the City
, by Buzz Bissinger (Random House). Raves for a
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's account of Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell's
battle against the city's decrepitude. In the New York Times Book
Review , Robert Fishman compares Bissinger's book to "such classics of urban
reportage and analysis as J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground ." Reviewers
especially like its scope: Bissinger interweaves the stories of a shipyard
worker and a poor black grandmother with political history. The Wall Street
Journal 's Fred Siegel, among others, praises Bissinger for showing both
Rendell's courage (he took on unions) and the limits of his old-school
liberalism. (Random House plugs the book.)
Cold
Mountain
, by Charles Frazier (Atlantic Monthly Press). The debate over
the National Book Award-winning Civil War novel, which has sold about 1 million
copies so far, escalates. Several recent reviews buck the critical consensus
and deride the book, the story of a Confederate deserter, for being too
self-consciously novelistic (James Gardner, National Review ). Like "a
literary approximation of an already literary idea of reality," says Slate's James
Wood. The Weekly Standar d's J. Bottum rebuts that Cold Mountain 's
highbrow critics misunderstand its middlebrow virtues. It is "a perfectly
enjoyable piece of sentimental fiction, straight from those golden days of the
1950s." (Click here for an excerpt.)
The
World According to Peter Drucker
, by Jack Beatty (The Free Press).
Critics anoint the Vienna-born management theorist Peter Drucker a great
intellectual. "Alone among the guru class, he grabbed hold of business and made
it do and say extraordinary things" (Michael Lewis, the New York Times Book
Review ). They emphasize Drucker's philosophical influences (he studied
Kierkegaard and political theory), his vast oeuvre , and his
long-standing doubts about free markets. Beatty wins praise for his clear
explications of Drucker's writings but is chided for "reducing what may have
been scintillating intellectual biography to ... a layman's guide" (Adrian
Wooldridge, the Wall Street Journal ).
Movies
Afterglow
(Sony Pictures Classics). Critics wax effusive about
Julie Christie's performance in Alan Rudolph's romantic drama. Christie's
character (a former horror-movie star) and her husband (Nick Nolte), their
marriage damaged by grief over their runaway daughter, pursue extramarital
affairs and unwittingly swap partners with a younger yuppie couple. Christie
"renders such a captivating performance that she alone justifies the price of
admission," says Variety 's Leonard Klady. Most critics fault the film on
other counts, particularly its languid pacing, stock characters (Nolte plays a
seductive handyman), and melodramatic dialogue. It "descends into a silly
season" (Janet Maslin, the New York Times ). (The studio trumpets the
movie here.)
Arguing the World
(First Run Films). A documentary about four
famed New York intellectuals (Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, and
Daniel Bell) occasions outpourings of nostalgia for the "vanished intellectual
era" of their youth (David Margolick, the New York Times ). The film wins
praise for charting the tumultuous friendships among these popular social
critics, as well as the evolution of all but Howe from '30s radicals to '60s
neoconservatives. Documentarian Joseph Dorman is credited with producing "one
of the deepest portraits ever filmed of the fluidity of ideas" (Stephen Holden,
the New York Times ).
Ma
Vie en Rose
(Sony Pictures Classics). Critics applaud rookie Belgian
director Alan Berliner's film, about a 7-year-old boy who yearns to be a girl,
for giving "an inside report ... from the enchanted, irradiated island of
childhood" (Richard Corliss, Time ). Critics appreciate its avoidance of
hackneyed gender politics, and its presentation of the boy's colorful,
cartoonlike fantasies. Praise goes to Georges Du Fresne, the child actor "who
seems, in some prodigious way, to understand" his character (Stanley Kauffmann,
the New Republic ). Dissenting, the Wall Street Journal 's Joe
Morgenstern says the movie is cloying, "cheerful nonsense" and that its
creators don't realize that "this kid is profoundly troubled." (Stills and
clips are available here.)
Updates
In the
New York Times , Maureen Dowd savages Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry: "This movie is not art. It is a clinical
document, an anthology of unexamined prejudices, a tiresome Manhattan whine."
... Toni Morrison's Paradise continues to divide critics. Time puts the novelist
on its cover and raves, "To read the novel is ... to confront questions as old
as human civilization itself." In Slate, Brent
Staples finds that the novel's "absence of workaday and historical detail keeps
the reader at a distance; many of Morrison's characters are impenetrable to the
mind's eye." ... The New Republic 's Jed Perl bashes the newly
opened J. Paul Getty Museum, designed by Richard Meier, whose
architecture, says Perl, "only works in coffee-table books. ... What Meier's
work lacks is heat, an organic flow."
Recent
"Summary Judgment" columns
Jan.
7:
Movie -- The
Apostle ;
Movie -- Oscar and
Lucinda ;
Movie -- The
Boxer ;
Television -- Seinfeld (NBC);
Book -- Truman
Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall
His Turbulent Career , by George Plimpton;
Book -- Paradise , by Toni Morrison;
Music --"Northern Lights: The Music of Jean Sibelius."
Dec.
31:
Winter
Movie Roundup
Dec.
24:
"The Year
in Review in Review"
Dec.
17:
Movie -- Titanic ;
Movie -- Deconstructing Harry ;
Movie -- Scream
2 ;
Television -- Ally
McBeal (Fox);
Art --"Gianni Versace"
(Metropolitan Museum of Art);
Architecture --Museum
of Modern Art (New York City);
Book -- Hogarth: A
Life and a World , by Jenny Uglow.
--Franklin Foer
