Word: birchings
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...easy task. Previous attempts at movie adaptations of Irving's novels have disappointed. Hotel New Hampshire, even with the talents of Jodie Foster and Beau Bridges, was pretty bad, and The World According to Garp, starring Robin Williams, wasn't much better. The worst, however, was Simon Birch, the big-screen "adaptation" of A Prayer for Owen Meany. It was so terrible, in fact, that Irving forced Disney to remove the original characters' names from the movie, leaving only a "loosely inspired by" credit. These films were missing one key piece: Irving himself. The Cider House Rules is the first...
...even more interesting in Orange County, nestled between Los Angeles and San Diego, where I live. Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda in 1913. Bob Dornan prevailed in one Congressional race after another until Loretta Sanchez thankfully ousted him from office. Community members founded a John Birch Society chapter there to weed out the Communists that had infiltrated the orange groves. The orange groves have since been replaced by Spanish-style roofs and strip malls. The people who shop at these pseudo-malls have an uncanny predilection for really, really, really tight clothes that bare a lot of skin...
...Webster Groves senior Rob Greenhaw reaches the Hollywood Video cash register, he recognizes classmate Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, fancied up in her white-ruffled tuxedo shirt, black patterned vest, and bow tie. Rob hands his video selection to Elizabeth, who scans it in, smiles and asks mischievously, "Simon Birch?" Rob, defensive, replies, "It's supposed to be good...
...over trees and then return home to wait for the grandson this ritual is supposed to guarantee. The searching need for faith is written on the faces of the Chinese who pace each day, by the thousands, through the "Confucian forest" in Qufu. There, among the 600-year-old birch trees, are buried 77 generations of Confucius' descendants. Their graves, trashed and looted during the Cultural Revolution, have been rebuilt and remade in this decade. During the Cultural Revolution, in the 1960s, angry adolescent Red Guards dug up Confucius' grave, the most sacred spot in the forest, to show...
...neighbor, self-hater. Because Lester is played by Kevin Spacey, we can see embers glowing behind his eyes even in the darkly comic early stages of the film when he has hit rock bottom: disdained by his harpy wife (Annette Bening), despised by his daughter (lovely, sad-faced Thora Birch) and distant from his own passions. The highlight of his day, Spacey tells us, is a quiet masturbation session in the shower. "It's all downhill from there." Spacey lets his mouth go limp to show us a broken soul, but the mugging face we see is always that...