June 4, 1998
Dear Everyone:
Last week, Monday was a holiday.
That bumped my day off to Tuesday.
By taking three days of vacation, I could have the whole week
off. Which I did.
What did I get done?
Not much. Four movies, five
videos. The toughest
decision of the day was whether to watch
A&E’s
Law and Order
at 10:00 a.m. or at 4:00 p.m., since it’s the same episode each time.
Planning your day around
syndication, that’s my idea of a vacation.
Of course, I did succumb to occasional bouts of
domesticity. Vacuumed the
carpets. Ironed the wrinkles
out of the bedroom drapes (left over from when they were folded in the
packaging). Neatened up and
rearranged a few small pieces of furniture.
Unpacked a few things from the three boxes still left over from
the move.
But I drew the line at washing windows or the
kitchen floor. You have to
stop somewhere. Then I’d
play hooky and go to another movie.
So, on with the movies...
The Horse
Whisperer.
Kristin
Scott Thomas plays a strong-willed, prosperous
New Yorker whose
daughter is crippled in an accident involving her horse.
Mother is the kind of woman who has to
do
something, so she packs up
kid and horse and carts them both off to
Montana to find a man
they call “the horse whisperer”.
Lots of panoramic shots of car and trailer driving through wide
open spaces.
Robert Redford,
who turns 61 this August, plays the wrangler with a knack for curing
traumatized animals. He’s
also the director, which accounts for the length of the film (almost
three hours). Redford likes
to let his story “evolve” and it moves at an evolutionary pace.
His character sets out to cure not only the horse, but mother and
daughter as well. Heck, he’d
cure the neighbor’s dog if he had a neighbor.
The relationship that grows between Thomas and Redford is a
little hard to swallow, seeing as he’s old enough to be her father and
she’s got Sam Neill
waiting at home for her. But
it’s inevitable, as is the ending, when it finally arrives.
And there isn’t even an iceberg to liven things up.
Deep
Impact. This is not
your typical summer disaster movie.
For one thing, it’s directed by
Mimi Leder, who
did last summer’s
Peacemaker, but who is better known for directing episodes of
ER
on TV. Usually, a disaster
movie sets you up with a list of characters.
Then disaster strikes:
An earthquake, a tornado, something crashes into something else.
And then you watch how the characters react to the catastrophe,
while saying to yourself, “Man, that was a dumb move.”
With this movie, you wait almost two hours before
anything really happens.
This is actually a two-Kleenex
tearjerker
disguised as a disaster film.
A young woman, a rookie reporter for
MSNBC, is onto what she
thinks is the scandal behind the sudden resignation of a high government
official. But then she
notices that the former official is stockpiling cans of
Ensure.
Soon she notices that a lot of high government officials are
stockpiling cans of Ensure.
This can’t be good.
And then everyone finds out about the
comet.
Families are torn apart and/or reunited.
There’s a really big splash and it’s bye-bye offshore drilling
platforms. The special
effects, when they finally arrive, are truly spectacular.
But until that happens, be sure to take along the Kleenexes.
Godzilla.
This is your typical
summer disaster movie. Lots
of mashing and mayhem for very little reason.
It begins with some really impressive mushroom clouds to let us
know that there’s been atomic testing on atolls in
French Polynesia.
And guess what? There
are lizards living on some of these islands.
Pretty soon, something big is happening.
And the Something Big is heading for
Manhattan.
Godzilla bites the
Big Apple.
Matthew
Broderick, finally playing someone his own age, is the biologist who
specializes in the effects of radiation on animal evolution and,
incidentally, growth. His
ex-girlfriend, a rookie reporter wannabe, accidentally gets him fired
and he has to team up with
Jean Reno, a French
actor who steals every scene he’s in.
And it takes something to steal a scene from Godzilla.
Lots of action sequences.
Godzilla running through the man-made canyons of New York, being
chased by strafing helicopters like so many really mean mosquitoes.
Godzilla taking out the mosquitoes and a number of high-rises in
the process. And this is the
second movie this summer that dares to answer the question:
Would Hollywood really destroy the
Brooklyn Bridge
for the sake of a good visual?
What do you think?
Quest for
Camelot. The boys at
Warner Bros.
have been watching
Disney
rake in the cash for decades.
Then they noticed all those little kids flocking to see
Fox’s
Anastasia
(again!) and said to themselves, “Hey, animation, music, revisionist
history. How hard can it
be?” Throw in some
well-known voices, like
Sir John Gielgud,
Pierce Brosnan,
Jane
Seymour and Gary
Oldman (still playing villains) and you’re in business, right?
Well, it’s no
Anastasia, but it’s charming nevertheless.
An evil knight has stolen
King Arthur’s
sword, Excalibur,
but it somehow got dropped into the Forbidden Forest.
A young girl, determined to become a knight, just like her father
(oh, yeah, they let that
happen in the Middle
Ages) sets off with the reluctant help of a handsome hermit to
recover the sword. Soon they
encounter the most delightfully daffy two-headed dragon named Devon and
Cornwall. The dragon gets
all the best lines, spoofing everything from
Shakespeare
to
The Lion
King to
Superman
The Movie.
There are a couple of actually good songs that will
probably show up on the radio soon.
And lots of jokes are aimed well over the heads of the kids.
Passed some of the adults in the audience, too, I noticed.
Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.
“Park” will love it.
I’m back at work this week and trying to get
AOL (at home) to let me
out onto the Internet
again. I’ve been having
problems and am currently corresponding via email with their technical
support. They ask questions.
I send back answers.
They suggest fixes. I’m at
the trying-the-suggested-fixes stage.
Just like being at the office.
Reviews of videos (assuming I can remember them
all) next week.
Love, as always,
Pete
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