Word: film
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...cotton bale, and many other startlements." Startlements are indeed in store: a one-eyed, toad-squishing salesman (Goodman); three maidens washing their laundry in a stream. These, and the name of the bombastic schemer Clooney plays - Everett Ulysses McGill - should be sufficient clues to identify the film's source: "based on The Odyssey by Homer." While tout Hollywood purloins comic books for its scenarios, Joel and Ethan Coen raid noble antiquity: not just Homer's fabulous travelog in verse but Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels" (for the movie's title) and MGM's "The Wizard of Oz" (for a delirious...
...Forrest Gump"), his disease ("Philadelphia"), his bereavement ("Sleepless in Seattle") or outer space ("Apollo 13"). As Chuck, he finds his best, most resourceful self in isolation. So does William Broyles Jr.'s script; the 80 mins. it spends on the atoll alone with Hanks make for engrossing storytelling. The film is less sure-footed back in civilization, with the girl Chuck left behind (Hunt). For its soul is on the beach, in its gradually unfolding secrets, its new perils and triumphs. The film has loved inhabiting the real estate of a restless, splendid solitude. So, perhaps, has Chuck...
...window of his Bronx apartment he watches black kids playing basketball in a vastly changed neighborhood. The best and brightest of them, Jamal (good newcomer Brown), penetrates his lair on a dare, and a mentoring relationship develops between the cranky old writer and the very bright teenager. The film's twists and turns are as predictable as the patronizing racism at the private school that grants the boy a scholarship. Something more surprising might have been made of this odd couple, but Van Sant, emptily employing the realist manner of his early films, is goodwill hunting in all the wrong...
...artist as a hopeless mess. Harris' great performance has a kind of blank grimness; it contains not a single moment of charm or self-awareness. Harris never allows his exhibitions of Pollock's inexplicable gift to soften or redeem the man's monstrousness. The result is a harrowing film, impossible to "like" in any conventional way, hypnotically impossible to turn away from...
...rich creep or a humanized husband and father. Kate sees it that way: when Jack talks his way into a job with the firm he used to run, she all but refuses the move to Manhattan. Who'd want to leave misery in the 'burbs? "Family Man" is a film that's fun to argue with. But at the end you may surrender to its "Wonderful Life" portrait of middle-class coping, and to Cage's poignant anguish. His features crumble, his shoulders sink under the burden of a strong man's perplexity...