Word: hollywood
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...seems as though the New Year's party in Iowa has already come and gone: Over the past month, presidential hopefuls have paraded a Who's Who of Hollywood celebrities through the state - from Oprah Winfrey to Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins - hoping to draw crowds and make their case. Iowans have delighted in getting the rare glimpse of a favorite star or scoring an autograph, but come Dec. 31, three nights before the caucuses, the star wattage will have dimmed and most candidates will be earnestly glad-handing, rather than gamboling about...
Carter has hope because Edward - however deep the Scrooge impulses that have earned him his fortune - is quickly revealed as the sort of super-rich subspecies Hollywood loves: the curmudgeon with a heart of gold. Nicholson played this character in As Good As It Gets; Andy Griffith had a shot at it this year in Waitress. Both are Old Testament deity types who want to spend their largesse on one lavish good deed, instead of, say, giving all the people in their employ a $2-an-hour pay raise. But, no, that would merely promote the general welfare; movies...
From Dark Victory to Patch Adams, Hollywood never found a cancer ward it couldn't spiff up, a death sentence that didn't have emotional uplift. In another new movie, The Savages, the issue ostensibly addressed is that of middle-aged siblings saddled with a cranky dad suffering from Alzheimer's ("Al What's-his-name's Disease," as a character says in the Tom Stoppard play Rock 'n' Roll). But that ordeal turns out to be the work of but a month, not decades - just long enough for the brother and sister to learn the cleansing importance of family...
...core convictions to fall back on, only addled appetites to satisfy. The film is co-written by Judd Apatow, (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) who can do no wrong in Hollywood right now, and Jake Kasdan, who also directs with a light and glancing hand. They are good-natured lads - smart, but not mean-spirited - and richly blessed by the presence of John C. Reilly in the title role. There's an almost pre-moral innocence about his soft and squishy mug, a heedless exuberance in his playing. He's happy to play dumb - allowing Dewey to live...
...doing it, and doing it well, for ages - The Graduate was released 40 years ago today - yet hasn't lost his stroke or his speed. Those deft directorial touches, and the intelligence the movie both exudes and assumes from its audience, put Charlie Wilson's War up there with Hollywood's grand old comedies: the Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder movies about slick schemers and their slicker women. The Nichols-Sorkin film is so much fun, you will not only forget all of Hollywood's serioso war movies, you may forget the international calamities that Wilson's largesse indirectly...