Word: hollywoodize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Empty movie houses are no spur to getting a movie financed, so would-be satires cop out by the final reel and become the thing they started to mock. Tropic Thunder devolves from a Hollywood diatribe, in which all the participants are greedy or loony, into Rambo VII or a peppier Platoon. And Hamlet 2 turns into an MGM musical with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, where the kids put on the big show in a barn - here, a warehouse. Instead of scorched-earth satire, this is parody plain and simple, especially simple. It has no greater intent than...
...Movies today, whether comedies or dramas, are proud of having renounced the piety of old Hollywood. Yet, however strong their bite or bitter their first taste, they're afraid to let the moviegoer leave with a dark thought in his mind; they require happy endings. That's one reason the typical modern movie is no more advanced than the sentimental antiques of Hollywood's Golden Age - and why Hamlet 2 is as needy as its hero - because it wants not to be probing or profound or even witty but, above all else, to be loved...
...Hollywood's Ticking Time Bomb I agree with James Poniewozik's assessment that Hollywood has yet to demonize China in the same way the news media have [Aug. 11]. However, one need only look at the parallels between negative news coverage and negative pop-culture depictions of Arabs and the Middle East during the past decade, or similar coverage of the Japanese during World War II, to see how closely one influences the other and how both influence the minds of the American people in different ways. The current political climate suggests that China is next. It may be only...
...Tell Stories and learned that Wilde's novel (which Booker describes as a "black fairy tale") headed the list of classic tragedies. And then there was the accidental death earlier this year of the actor Heath Ledger. "You have this beautiful, talented being dropped into another world - Hollywood - where everyone wants to get in with you," says Bourne. "Would he have died if he'd stayed in Australia, I wonder, or was he a victim of modern celebrity...
...Alive, the Woodman has not been residing in the auteur empyrean for the past couple of decades. There was a four-film stretch of genuine stinkers - Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending and Anything Else - followed by one, Melinda and Melinda, that rose to the level of eh. And since this quintessential New Yorker exiled himself to Europe (where his fondest admirers live, and where the money for his pictures now comes from), he'd made a suave sex-and-murder mystery, Match Point, and two that deserve to have the veil of anonymity drawn...