Movies
My
Giant
(Columbia Pictures). Critics wonder why Billy Crystal's recent
movies aren't as funny as his Oscar-night performances. This time they say he
is outperformed by co-star Gheorghe Muresan, a 7-foot-7-inch basketball player
who can hardly speak English. They say Crystal tries too hard to be likable
even though his character is a slimy Hollywood agent who exploits Muresan.
Others blame the story, co-written by Crystal, for its facile morality lessons.
"Comedy and pathos keep getting in each other's way," says the Boston
Globe 's Jay Carr. (Clips are available here.)
City of Angels
(Warner Bros.). Lukewarm reviews for a remake of
German director Wim Wenders' art film Wings of Desire (1987). "As
literate and understated as one could expect" from Hollywood, says the Los
Angeles Times ' Kenneth Turan. Pluses: beautiful panoramas of Los Angeles
and great chemistry between stars Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan. Minuses: the
film's New Age spirituality, its sentimental ending, and Cage's lack of acting
range. He speaks, says the New York Times ' Stephen Holden, in "a hushed,
gee-whiz semi-whisper that's meant to convey profundity but ... sounds like the
shallow come-on of a cult leader." (Click here for the official
site.)
The
Big One
(Miramax). Another documentary in which left-wing
provocateur Michael Moore ( Roger & Me ) hounds CEOs. Most
critics love his pointed satire, especially such antics as offering Nike's
chairman a free ticket to Indonesia so he can visit his company's sweatshops
there. Moore's shtick, says Entertainment Weekly 's Owen Gleiberman,
"shows more American enterprise than anything it's attacking." Others find
Moore self-aggrandizing. This film is "about the upsizing of Michael Moore,"
who is guilty of "oily smugness and sublime narcissism" (Stephen Hunter, the
Washington Post ).
Television
Brave New World
(NBC; Sunday, April 19, 9 p.m. ET/PT). Applause
for the made-for-TV version of Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel. Reviewers
like its fidelity to the book and Leonard Nimoy's turn as an apparatchik. Most
express amazement at Huxley's uncanny foresight. "Certain features of Huxley's
imagined universe--set six centuries into the future--would in fact become
realities within a few decades" (Dorothy Rabinowitz, the Wall Street
Journal ). Dissenting, New York 's John Leonard says the show
gratuitously injects a happy ending and melodrama: "Huxley has been networked."
(NBC plugs its show here.)
Books
Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961-1973
, by Robert
Dallek (Oxford University Press). The second of two installments in the
presidential scholar's biography of the 36 th president is deemed
"sound and judicious," and a corrective to Robert Caro's polemical anti-Johnson
tomes (Sean Wilentz, the New York Times Book Review ). Critics seize on
the lurid details, from LBJ's exposing himself to reporters to his
behind-the-scenes machinations during the 1968 presidential campaign. The
book's prodigious research is taken to validate the view of Johnson's
presidency as a Shakespearean tragedy in which his megalomaniacal commitment to
the Vietnam War ruined his ambitious liberal domestic agenda.
Nat
Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960
, by William Boyd (21 Publishing).
Critics delight in "one of the great literary hoaxes of the century" (David
Lister, the Independent ), in which a best-selling British novelist tries
to pass off his "biography" of a nonexistent painter as authentic. At an A-list
Soho book party, Boyd's co-conspirator David Bowie read a passage to a
credulous audience. English critics say the crowd's gullibility proves the New
York art establishment's "utter obliviousness to the ridiculous" (the
Guardian ). Stateside, Newsweek 's Peter Plagens insists that
"hardly anybody was duped."
Quarantine
, by Jim Crace (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The
celebrated British writer ( Arcadia ), who has been short listed for
Britain's Booker Prize, wins praise as an anti-Norman Mailer for his brash
novel about Jesus' life. In Crace's version, a rebellious, bratty Jesus dies of
starvation at the end of his 40-day sojourn in the wilderness. Unlike Mailer's
"autobiography" of Christ, The Gospel According to the Son ,
Quarantine is lauded for its historical accuracy, lyrical prose, and
risqué plot.
Theater
Wait
Until Dark
(Brooks Atkinson Theatre). Critics agree that Pulp
Fiction director Quentin Tarantino, debuting as a Broadway actor
opposite Marisa Tomei, "should be humiliated" by his performance (Vincent
Canby, the New York Times ). His faults are said to range from the small
(he can't render accents) to the large (he exhibits the "charisma of a week-old
head of lettuce," says the New York Daily News ' Fintan O'Toole). The
play itself, a revival of a 1966 thriller, fares no better: "a tediously
contrived wind-up toy that yells 'Boo!' just before it winds down" (Ben
Brantley, the New York Times ). Still, the show, having sold out its
initial run, is being extended.
Recent
"Summary Judgment" columns
April
8:
Movie -- Lost in
Space ;
Movie -- The Butcher
Boy ;
Movie -- The Spanish
Prisoner ;
Music -- Left of the
Middle , by Natalie Imbruglia;
Television -- Push (ABC);
Television -- Frontline: From Jesus to Christ--The First Christians
(PBS);
Book -- An Instance
of the Fingerpost , by Iain Pears;
Book -- Cavedweller , by Dorothy Allison.
April
1:
Movie -- Grease ;
Movie -- The Newton
Boys ;
Television -- From
the Earth to the Moon (HBO);
Television -- Teletubbies (PBS);
Theater -- The Sound
of Music ;
Book -- The All-True
Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton , by Jane Smiley;
Book--
Consilience:
The Unity of Knowledge , by E.O. Wilson;
Fashion --Fall Lines.
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.
--Franklin Foer
