[See “Conventional Cuts,” The American Spectator of December, 2006-January, 2007, under “Articles”]
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This film by Peter Hedges tries hard to be both charming and uplifting but doesn’t quite succeed in being either
Music of the Heart is certainly heartwarming, though you may be inclined to object, as I do, to having your heart warmed by an emotional blast-furnace. The first non-horror flick by its director, Wes Craven, the film is, not surprisingly, altogether too fond of the cheap emotional effect and is constantly taking the easy routes…
Shouldn’t a heartwarming family comedy start with a heartwarming family? Not, apparently, if they’re the Douglases.
Buddy by Caroline Thompson is the (more or less) true story of Gertrude Lintz (Rene Russo), a Brooklyn socialite of the 1920s and 30s and author of Animals Are My Hobby, who raised chimpanzees as if they were children with some interesting results and later tried the same trick with a gorilla (the eponymous Buddy,…
. . .and the bad guys live happily ever after with their ill-gotten gains. Ho-hum. What a cliché this is becoming.
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