Word: hollywoodizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...AGENCY IN LONDON LAST WEEK was filming a TV commercial for Greenpeace. Directed by Hollywood horrormeister Roger Corman (A Bucket of Blood, Swamp Women), it opens with a mother beckoning to her children. At first they surround her lovingly, lavishing hugs and kisses on her. Then they turn savage, scratching and dragging her to the ground, where she is left battered and bleeding. The heavy-handed metaphor is meant to represent Mother Earth's treatment by humans, but it might just as well serve as a caution for Greenpeace itself...
Based quite faithfully on an Elmore Leonard best seller, Get Shorty is most significantly true to the book's basic attitude toward Hollywood. Perhaps because he deals with the movie business from a position of strength--he writes things it needs--Leonard omits the contempt with which novelists traditionally drench their Hollywood horror stories. Leonard simply drops a real killer in among the rubber sharks, then sits back watchfully, his only comment a benign (or, at worst, sardonic) chuckle as his hero quietly chews them...
...life. The film goes out of its way to show us that, when these characters go on a long walk through the fields, they come back wet and dirty, their hems torn and stained. At night, there isonly candlelight, casting everything into shadow. And, in sharp contrast to usual Hollywood practice, nobody looks like a model; the women wear no make-up, the men are paunchy and badly shaven. The film also benefits from some finely drawn minor characters. Louisa Musgrove, her brother Charles, and Admiral and Mrs. Croft (Fiona Shaw) are all sympathetically portrayed...
...come to expect from its author. In a lovely passage, Vidal says he learned from his grandfather ''the ability to detect the false notes in those arias that our shepherds lull their sheep with"--and in fact his story sparkles when he deftly exposes the hypocrisies of Hollywood and Washington. As a writer he is at his best as an uncompromising critic, and at one point turns his sensibility on himself with sharp-eyed accuracy: ''In this text," he writes, "I am not moving toward anything that I am aware...
Nothing is less funny these days than the state of movie comedy. The Hollywood farces dominating the world's screens are sad affairs populated by TV stars playing dumb. The notion of laughter as a worldwide language is dormant, presumed dead. So what's a viewer...