Movies
Grease
(Paramount). The 1950s nostalgia film, panned when it was
released in 1978, fares better on re-release as a 1970s nostalgia film.
The remastered version takes in $13 million its first weekend, just behind
Titanic at the box office. Critics also come around. "As timeless as its
bad-boy-meets-good-girl plot" (Susan Wloszczyna, USA Today ). Most
reviewers celebrate the career of its star John Travolta, then 23: "an
invaluable cultural icon ... an important and enduring movie star" (Roger
Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times ). And Entertainment Weekly 's Lisa
Schwarzbaum discovers latent homosexuality in the "intense boy-boy communion"
within Travolta's gang. (Click here for the official site.)
The
Newton Boys
(20 th Century Fox). A lukewarm response to
Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater's first venture beyond Gen
X. His western about the most accomplished bank robbers in American history is
faulted for lacking the conventions--exciting chase scenes, gunfights, and
black-hatted villains--that give the genre its enduring appeal. The characters
played by young hunks Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, and Vincent D'Onofrio
are said to suffer in comparison to the real-life characters, clips of whom
Linklater weaves into the film. "It's the Bland Boys almost all the way" (Amy
Taubin, the Village Voice ). (A trailer is available here.)
Television
From
the Earth to the Moon
(HBO; click here for
schedule). Apollo 13 star Tom Hanks produces a $68 million, 12 hour
docudrama about NASA, from the first Mercury launch (1961) to the last moon
voyage (1972). Critics declare it a noble failure. They're taken with its
enthusiasm for space exploration, which has lost its mystique since the '70s.
But they also say the series is "too long, too prolix, too cable" (Ken Tucker,
Entertainment Weekly ) and gets bogged down in irrelevant details. In one
episode, notes Time 's James Collins, "the only source of suspense ... is
a worry over the winds on the day of lift-off." (HBO plugs the show here.)
Teletubbies
(PBS; click here for schedule).
Controversy over this British show, just reaching the United States, which
bills itself as the first program for 1-year-old children. Is the show, about
the picaresque adventures of futuristic toddlers, bad for babies? U.S. News
& World Report cites psychologists who argue that it will addict babies
to television, hindering their mental development. The magazine calls
Teletubbies a marketing ploy cloaked as education. Others find camp
virtues in the "sublimely ridiculous experience" of the show (Tucker) and note
that in England it has a large following with gay men.
Theater
The
Sound of Music
(Martin Beck Theater, New York City). Critics find no
reason for this revival of the treacly 1959 musical. "The most saccharine of
the Rodgers and Hammerstein" collaborations, says New York 's John Simon.
Although reviewers grant that this production benefits from some nuanced
performances, they still conclude that "The Sound of Music isn't really
for grown-ups" (Ben Brantley, the New York Times ). They predict
audiences will continue to devour the show's sentimental story anyway.
Books
The
All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
, by Jane Smiley
(Knopf). After writing a polemical 1996 essay attacking Huckleberry Finn
as immoral, Pulitzer Prize winner Smiley sets out to improve on Twain with a
novel about an abolitionist woman in antebellum Kansas Territory. Critics don't
like the book any more than the essay. In the New York Times Book Review
Thomas Mallon faults Lidie Newton for "dutiful caricatures of white
degeneracy and black nobility ... the purest P.C."
Slate
's
Sarah
Kerr says that "for someone so bent on unmasking pieties, Smiley is not
above her own kind of sanctimony." (To read the first three chapters, click
here.)
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
, by E.O. Wilson (Knopf). The
famed Harvard sociobiologist argues that all phenomena--art, economics,
science--can be understood by studying the brain's neural pathways. Critics
line up on opposing sides. Some praise his emphasis on biology as "a strong
antidote to the trendy campus fatalists who hold truth to be subjective" (R.Z.
Sheppard, Time ). Skeptics renew old attacks on sociobiology's
all-encompassing view of human nature. "He is the Mr. Magoo of scientific
theory, genially oblivious to everything he can't or won't see" (Daniel
Mendelsohn, the New York Observer ). (In
Slate
, Steven Pinker
praises the book. Click here to read the first chapter.)
Fashion
Fall
Lines . The unveiling of fall lines in Milan, Paris, and New York City over
the last three weeks--accompanied by unprecedented cable TV coverage--leads the
New York Time s' Ruth La Ferla to declare runway shows "the spectator
sport of the decade." This year's lines are noted for representing a backlash
against feminism--"fashion's new womanliness," Time 's Ginia Bellafante
calls it--with a return to pinks, pleats, and furs. Some critics fault the
younger designers for not taking risks, preferring the continuing inventiveness
of such veterans as Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino, and Jean-Paul Gaultier.
(
Slate
's Anne Hollander explains the pleasures of the runway
show.)
Update
In the
Los Angeles Times , Oscar-winning Titanic director James Cameron
savages the paper's chief movie critic, Kenneth Turan, for panning his movie on
two separate occasions. "Nobody's interested in the vitriolic ravings of a
bitter man who attacks and rips apart movies that the great majority of viewers
find well worth their time and money."
Recent "Summary Judgment"
columns
March
25:
Event --70 th Academy Awards;
Television -- Sitcom
Roundup ;
Movie -- Primary
Colors ;
Movie -- Wild
Things ;
Movie -- Taste of
Cherry ;
Theater -- Cabaret ;
Opera -- Lohengrin .
March
18:
Movie -- The Man in
the Iron Mask ;
Movie -- Love and
Death on Long Island ;
Movie -- Men With
Guns ;
Television -- Lateline (NBC);
Television -- Significant
Others (ABC);
Pop -- Pilgrim ,
by Eric Clapton;
Book -- Spin
Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine , by Howard Kurtz;
Book -- The
Children , by David Halberstam.
March
11:
Movie -- The Big
Lebowski ;
Movie -- Primary
Colors hype;
Movie -- Twilight ;
Movie -- U.S.
Marshals ;
Theater -- The
Beauty Queen of Leenane ;
Book -- One Nation,
After All , by Alan Wolfe;
Book -- A History of the American People , by Paul Johnson.
March
4:
Movie -- An Alan
Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn ;
Movie -- Krippendorf's Tribe ;
Movie -- Lolita ;
Music -- Ray of
Light , by Madonna;
Book -- The
Smithsonian Institution , by Gore Vidal;
Theater -- Art ;
Art --"Chuck Close" (Museum of Modern Art).
--Franklin Foer
