Word: hollywoodizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This tale of a small-town high school teacher (Kevin Kline) whose life turns upside down when he's declared gay by a former student-turned-movie star (Matt Dillon) marks Hollywood's own comingout party. No wonder then that it's a bland comedy that ends up reinforcing, not puncturing, gay stereotypes, and squanders a fine comic cast. Kline manages to rise above the plodding humor, especially in his show-stopping dance scenes, and Selleck is terrific as the sleazy, faintly Mephistophelean tabloid reporter who dogs his footsteps...
...know L.A. Confidential has ended when it is both daytime and not raining. In a fine version of the somewhat beefy Ellroy crime novel ostensibly about a strange murder, director Curtis Hanson portrays the cool, brutal world of Hollywood glam and corrupt police in 50s Los Angeles with all its gradations of ethics. Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe turn in fine performances that give us two different approaches to policing, thinking first and hitting later, or vice versa. A reptilian James Cromwell and slick Kevin Spacey round out a fine cast and a finer tale...
With the Oscar award winning Leaving Las Vegas, director Mike Figgis made a film that was as hopelessly romantic as it was depressing. With no trappings of saccharine Hollywood sentimentality, Figgis' grim valentine was one of the best films of 1995 because it achieved a refreshing balance between pulp tragedy and true-love lyricism. Although his follow-up One Night Stand has much in common thematically with Leaving Las Vegas, and once again showcases Figgis' stylish direction, it lacks the earlier film's complexity and emotional heft (not to mention a powerhouse performance from a great actor like Nicolas Cage...
...Night Stand charts the effects of a casual infidelity on the life and marriage of a commercial director, admirably portrayed by Wesley Snipes. Although it lapses towards the end, it is better than most Hollywood fare in dealing with its provocative subject matter. The film attempts to address the issues of adultery and loss intelligently, and doesn't make the mistake of sensationalizing the interracial relationships (Snipes cheats on his Asian-American wife with a white woman) at its center. However it is far from equal to Vegas, or Figgis' earlier films Internal Affairs and the lesser-known noir confection...
...fight to reveal a perfectly bald pate; the western hero who coolly plugs his lover when the bad guy tries to use her as a shield in a gun fight. Sam didn't strain for these bold, indelible moments. They just came naturally to him. Haute Hollywood patronized him--low budgets, no Oscars--and the dominant middlebrow critics of his high time, the 1950s and early '60s, dismissed him. It was O.K. to see the world as a dung heap if you eventually deplored it, but you weren't supposed to be as exuberantly unjudgmental about the vulgarly obsessed creatures...