DesertFox
07-23-2005, 07:30 PM
Andrew Sullivan
... It has always been true that Hollywood put commerce before art. It has always been true that celebrity often drove casting, and that sex drove celebrity. But none of that glorious sordid American reality produced movies as bad as the ones we now have to endure.
Take the two films that a wonderful actress, Nicole Kidman, has starred in over the past two summers. Last year she appeared in a remake of The Stepford Wives. The original was a campy, creepy 1970s feminist screed. The Kidman version was an artless, humour-free, dumb-as-a-post sitcom with a logic-free plot.
This summer she starred as Samantha in another painful, universally-panned remake, of the cheerful early 1960s sitcom Bewitched. What exactly was an actress of Kidman’s calibre doing anywhere near it? Perhaps the most concise answer is money. ...
A couple of years ago [critic David] Thomson related the problem in an interview with the journalist Robert Birnbaum: “Someone comes along and says, ‘Look, Tom Cruise is a secret agent. Goes all over the world. Beautiful exotic locations. Lot of very high-tech machinery. Four or five beautiful women. Two or three major supporting actors as villains. Do you like it?’” The script, the storyline, the characters, the photography are almost afterthoughts.
And so you get something like this summer’s War of the Worlds. It’s another remake; its script is risible, the effects are amazing (but no better any more than most state-of-the-art video games), the characters are cartoons, and the acting rarely gets beyond movie-of-the-week quality. The ending was so corny and contrived the audience I saw it with burst out laughing.
And this was Spielberg!
Entire article (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1705823,00.html)
... It has always been true that Hollywood put commerce before art. It has always been true that celebrity often drove casting, and that sex drove celebrity. But none of that glorious sordid American reality produced movies as bad as the ones we now have to endure.
Take the two films that a wonderful actress, Nicole Kidman, has starred in over the past two summers. Last year she appeared in a remake of The Stepford Wives. The original was a campy, creepy 1970s feminist screed. The Kidman version was an artless, humour-free, dumb-as-a-post sitcom with a logic-free plot.
This summer she starred as Samantha in another painful, universally-panned remake, of the cheerful early 1960s sitcom Bewitched. What exactly was an actress of Kidman’s calibre doing anywhere near it? Perhaps the most concise answer is money. ...
A couple of years ago [critic David] Thomson related the problem in an interview with the journalist Robert Birnbaum: “Someone comes along and says, ‘Look, Tom Cruise is a secret agent. Goes all over the world. Beautiful exotic locations. Lot of very high-tech machinery. Four or five beautiful women. Two or three major supporting actors as villains. Do you like it?’” The script, the storyline, the characters, the photography are almost afterthoughts.
And so you get something like this summer’s War of the Worlds. It’s another remake; its script is risible, the effects are amazing (but no better any more than most state-of-the-art video games), the characters are cartoons, and the acting rarely gets beyond movie-of-the-week quality. The ending was so corny and contrived the audience I saw it with burst out laughing.
And this was Spielberg!
Entire article (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1705823,00.html)