Word: hollywoodized
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Movie critics secretly believe what so many Hollywood films teach: that even the most ordinary schlubbs can rise to excellence. So this reviewer was happy to salute the recent films of two Hollywood types who previously, to put it politely, hadn't made masterpieces. This summer, Adam Sandler dispensed with his standard idiot character and his movies' gay-baiting infantilism to play a borderline adult in the rambunctious, satisfying You Don't Mess With the Zohan. Director Adam Shankman, who had slummed in Disney comedies about exasperated adults and the sassy kids in their care (The Pacifier, Cheaper...
...transition from silents to talkies, and the rise of the big studio picture, Sragow's thorough scene-setting could double as a cinematic history lesson - illuminating the many famous lives that Fleming touched (and helped to shape) and the ways in which sets, casts, contracts and careers worked during Hollywood's grand glory days...
...achievement was the 1962 film version of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The picture - which won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, and earned Mulligan his only Oscar nomination - had an immediate and lasting impact. Back then it provided a Hollywood echo of the civil rights agitation that had roiled the South and seized the nation. But Peck's role as Atticus Finch, a crusading attorney who is also a gentle single dad to his two young kids, had staying power. In 2003 the American Film Institute chose Atticus...
...Stranger (1964), Natalie Wood is an Italian Catholic shopgirl who becomes pregnant in the one-night-stand immaculate conceptions familiar in movies of the '60s (and today; see Knocked Up). But since she had the good fortune to be impregnated by McQueen, true love is assured. The plot is Hollywood hokum with a patina of New Yawk grit, but Mulligan was always an ace at revealing the subtle starlight behind the Kleig lights...
...romance of a teenage boy and a lovely young war widow; The Other (1972), a spectral mood piece about nine-year-old twins involved in murder; and Same Time, Next Year (1978), with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn as annual adulterers. As his career wore on, and Hollywood jettisoned sentiment and subtlety for sharks and light sabers, Mulligan's aura dimmed. He had outlived the mood he so delicately captured...