Word: woolf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...pleasure-seeker, he travels ceaselessly, eats and drinks abundantly and lies fluently. Boyd insinuates his hero as an extra into several historical panoramas--the General Strike of 1926, the Spanish Civil War--and has some cheeky fun with celebrity cameos: Picasso appears as a manic Left Bank chatterbox, Virginia Woolf as a venomous cocktail-party boor, and in what amounts to literary incest, Mountstuart indulges in a brief snog with Waugh himself...
Nicole Kidman, whose portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours won her a Best Actress Golden Globe (by a nose), looks at the women's genre and says, "There's an audience for that. There's a lot of us out there." Scott Rudin, The Hours' producer, sees the Christmas-to-Valentine season as "a good time for movies that aren't entirely aimed at teenage boys." Playwright David Hare, whom Rudin hired to adapt Michael Cunningham's novel, notes the glut of year-end prestige movies: "All the intelligent films come out at exactly the same time, because they...
...directly traceable to Mom's long-ago desertion of him. Somehow, despite the complexity of the film's structure, this all seems too simple-minded. Or should we perhaps say agenda driven? The same criticisms might apply to the fact that both these fictional characters (and, it is hinted, Woolf herself) find what consolation they can in a rather dispassionate lesbianism. This ultimately proves insufficient to lend meaning to their lives or profundity to a grim and uninvolving film, for which Philip Glass unwittingly provides the perfect score--tuneless, oppressive, droning, painfully self-important...
...imagine this intricate intertwining of historically and geographically separate lives working as a literary conceit. Indeed, Michael Cunningham won a Pulitzer Prize for it with his novel The Hours. While a reader can imagine Woolf and the others, a movie must literally flesh out fictional creations, and so a certain unfortunate literalness of presentation creeps into the picture. Watching The Hours, one finds oneself focusing excessively on the unfortunate prosthetic nose Kidman affects in order to look more like the novelist. And wondering why the screenwriter, David Hare, and the director, Stephen Daldry, turn Woolf, a woman of incisive mind...
...Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) published Mrs. Dalloway in 1925. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) reads it in post--World War II Southern California, and it reshapes her life. In present-day New York City, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) lives a version of the day Woolf imagined for her protagonist in distant London...