Word: fiction
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...Travolta-the sultry young stud of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, the wily thug of Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty and Face/Off-hasn't been up close with another guy recently. In his new movie, Hairspray, based on the 1988 John Waters comedy and the 2002-Tony-winning musical, he does a funny-passionate dance with Christopher Walken. And Walken leads. Travolta, walking in the pumps of Divine in the earlier film and Harvey Fierstein on Broadway, plays Edna Turnblad, the beyond-zaftig Baltimore mom of a '60s teenage girl who dreams of appearing on a local TV dance show. (Walken...
...million). He had endured the first big up-down in a notably seismic career. Urban Cowboy boom, Two of a Kind bust; Staying Alive a zig, Perfect a zag. The sassy-baby Look Who's Talking was his top grosser since Grease; then he had another recession until Pulp Fiction pegged him as the cool bad guy and won him a string of hits. Another soft phase set in until this year's comedy smash Wild Hogs...
...locations. But no filmmaker can match Werner Herzog for inspiring recklessness. The German director's movie sojourns take him not just to remote corners of Peru, Alaska and Thailand but also to the uncharted interior of man's highest, most lunatic dreams. In a 46-year career of great fiction films (Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Heart of Glass; Nosferatu; Fitzcarraldo) and in a string of amazing, hallucinatory documentaries (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, The White Diamond, Grizzly Man), Herzog, 64, has trekked into the emotional wilderness to capture on film humanity's heart of darkness, heart of hope...
...nearly as colorful, for one thing. All of them, nevertheless, are part of a major societal shift: single women, once treated as virtual outcasts, have moved to the center of our social and cultural life. Unattached females--wisecracking, gutsy gals, not pathetic saps--are the heroine du jour in fiction, from Melissa Bank's collection of stories, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, the publishing juggernaut that has spawned one sequel and will soon be a movie. The single woman is TV's It Girl as well, not just...
...with Jimmy. I grew up on animation, I respect the medium's artistry and dote on its jokes. This week, while on vacation, I watched a few animated films: the Pixar movie Ratatouille, which opened yesterday in nearly 4,000 North American theaters; the Japanese science-fiction epic Paprika, now playing in 20 major cities; Aachi & Ssipak, which is playing at the New York Asian Film Festival; Queer Duck: The Movie, the tres gay comedy that's available on DVD; and for old times' sake, this year's Oscar-winning, made-in-Australia animated feature Happy Feet...