Movies
Out
of Sight
(Universal Pictures). TV star George Clooney, long maligned
for his "one-trick-pony acting style ... [of] ducking his handsome head and
raising his eyes" (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone ), finally emerges as a
movie star. Critics delight in the chemistry between his character, a charming
bank robber, and that of Jennifer Lopez, a federal marshal. Director Steven
Soderbergh ( sex, lies and videotape ) wins praise for preserving the
humor, unorthodox narrative, and genre-bending of Elmore Leonard's
noir-thriller-romance novel. (Visit the official site; also read David
Edelstein's review in
Slate
.)
Smoke Signals
(Miramax). Billed as the first feature film by
Native Americans, this picaresque tale wins reviewers' admiration for being
"palpably authentic" (Richard Schickel, Time ). Critics like the story,
about a young man and his friend who set out to retrieve his father's ashes,
for eschewing "the high seriousness and dubious mysticism" of most films about
the Indians' plight (John Anderson, Newsday ). Although everyone enjoys
its wry humor and cutting observations about life on the reservation, a few say
its aimless plot betrays its makers' inexperience.
Dr.
Dolittle
(20 th Century Fox). After reviving his career with
a smash-hit remake of The Nutty Professor (1996), Eddie Murphy reprises
Rex Harrison's 1967 role as the man who talks with animals--but to less
acclaim. Forgetting that the original Dolittle was also panned, critics
pine for "the good old days of children's movies" (Rod Dreher, the New York
Post ). They lament the remake's addition of "a witless barrage of off-color
bathroom humor" (Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times ) and its use of
sophisticated computer graphics to make cute animals engage in sexual innuendo.
Murphy's comic talents are said to be underutilized. (The studio trumpets the
site here.)
Gone With the Wind
(New Line Cinema). A critical backlash against
the 1939 classic on the occasion of its remastered rerelease. "Overrated,
overlong and overdue for oblivion," says the Washington Post 's Stephen
Hunter. The revisionists harp loudest on GWTW 's racist romanticization
of the Old South. Most critics still consider it a masterwork and celebrate the
virtuosity of Vivien Leigh's performance and the film's Old Hollywood grandeur.
The counterrevisionist spin: Leigh and Clark Gable are unsentimental "moderns
... who have no time for the fake politeness of this fatally genteel world"
(Turan, the Los Angeles Times ). (The official site offers tie-ins
galore.)
Art
"Bonnard" (Museum of Modern Art, New York City). With his first New York
show in 30 years, the French painter (1867-1947) overcomes his dismissal by
Picasso on the grounds that "he's not really a modern painter." Critics declare
Bonnard's landscapes, nudes, and self-portraits more than dated Impressionism,
deeming them "[s]ome of the most extraordinary paintings of his quickly ending
century" (Christopher
Benfey,
Slate
). They say that his dreamlike images show a
"Proustian" concern with the mechanics of perception and that his later nudes
are "tinged with necrophilia" (Francine Prose, the Wall Street Journal ).
(MoMA's site serves up a slew of paintings.)
Books
Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton
, by Dianne Wood
Middlebrook (Houghton Mifflin). A new biography of Billy Tipton--an obscure
jazzman who was revealed, only at death, to have been a jazzwoman--elevates its
subject into the "pantheon of legendary women who have successfully passed as
men" (Holly Brubach, the New York Times Book Review ). Middlebrook, a
professor at Stanford, uses Tipton to support the postmodernist contention that
gender is a historic construction, but critics mostly wax prurient. They obsess
over how Tipton duped her wives into believing she was male. Some chastise
Middlebrook for resting her speculations on scant evidence.
The
Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
, by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith
Grossman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Critics are divided over the Peruvian
novelist's latest, about the fantasies of an insurance executive whose
estranged wife slept with his preadolescent son. Some critics are tickled by
his parody of Latin American machismo, his scatological humor, and his
taboo-busting musings about sex. "[I]t would be pornographic, if it weren't
art" (Walter Kendrick, the New York Times Book Review ). Others find that
the novel's format--a combination of letters and rambling diatribes--makes the
story repetitious and tedious.
Recent
"Summary Judgment" columns
June
24:
Movie -- The X
Files ;
Movie --100 Years, 100
Movies (AFI);
Movie -- Mulan ;
Art --"Charles
Ray;"
Book -- Walking With
the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement , by John Lewis, with Michael D'Orso;
Book -- Ship of Gold:
In the Deep Blue Sea , by Gary Kinder;
Book -- A Beautiful Mind , by Sylvia Nasar.
June
17:
Movie -- Six Days,
Seven Nights ;
Movie -- The Opposite
of Sex ;
Movie -- High
Art ;
Theater -- Not About
Nightingales ;
Television -- The
Magic Hour ;
Book -- Gain , by Richard Powers.
June
10:
Movie -- The Truman
Show ;
Movie -- A Perfect
Murder ;
Movie -- Kurt and
Courtney ;
Television -- Sex and
the City (HBO);
Theater --The Tony
Awards;
Art --"Edward
Burne-Jones, Victorian Artist-Dreamer";
Book -- Cold New World , by William Finnegan.
June
3:
Movie -- The Last
Days of Disco ;
Movie -- Hope
Floats ;
Television -- More
Tales of the City (Showtime);
Television -- A
Bright Shining Lie (HBO) and Thanks of a Grateful Nation
(Showtime);
Art --"Mark
Rothko";
Theater -- Corpus Christi .
--Franklin Foer
