Don't Bother
[See “Entry from August 6, 2008” under “My Diary”]
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The joke that gives As Good As It Gets its title is the best thing in the picture. Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), a successful novelist, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder which manifests itself in an insane punctiliousness about rituals, not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, excessive hand-washing and the like. When his routine is disrupted…
Yet another showcase of British acting talent turns out to be pretty good as a movie too.
Going All the Way, directed by Mark Pellington, to a screenplay adapted by Dan Wakefield from his own novel is yet another among the plethora of recent cinematic evocations of the 1950s—and one which, I would have thought, might have elicited one or two protests from women because of the way that it treats them…
Dr Doolittle, directed by Betty Thomas, stars Eddie Murphy as the eponymous doctor who can talk to the animals. For the nineties, all the whimsy of Hugh Lofting’s literary creation and the earlier film version starring Rex Harrison has given way to post-modern joking as celebrity voices are put into animal mouths and made to…
Outside Providence, adapted from his own novel by Peter Farelly, with his brother, Bobby, and directed by Michael Corrente, is better than most of the other late-summer kid movies, such as Detroit Rock City, The Adventures of Sebastian Cole or Teaching Mrs. Tingle. For one thing, it actually has some sort-of funny lines in it—for…
You’ve got to wonder about the chutzpah — or the stupidity — of a director who would invite comparisons between his movie and what is arguably the greatest work of dramatic art ever penned, Shakespeare’s King Lear. But the Danish director, Kristian Levring, has done it, and on the whole we can be glad that…
