Word: keaton
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Cinema: Michael Keaton dies beautifully in My Life...
Like all of us, Bob Jones (Michael Keaton) has a death sentence hanging over him. But the clock is ticking faster for Bob: his kidney cancer has spread to his lungs and brain. Nothing can save him, not his youth, his cushy show-biz job, his loving wife (Nicole Kidman) or the child she carries inside her. Nor is he comforted by memories of a childhood disconnected from his working-class parents. So Bob decides to videotape a few remarks...
...with twists, the old Surrealist vision of women as sorceresses or passive, quasi-mechanical objects of desire. It is no surprise to learn of her enthusiasm for the films of Luis Bunuel -- or, given the yearning and farcical behavior of some of her later sculptures, for those of Buster Keaton. Keaton, Horn points out, "has to invent the apparatus to achieve what he wants, and becomes completely obsessed by his mad world of imaginary things...
...feminist might argue that this proves the male is inherently less intuitive than the female. Or, more radically, that exploited womankind has better reason to be on guard than guys do. Woody Allen might argue that it is just plain funnier if supposedly ditsy Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton) insists there's something odd about the death of a neighbor while her husband Larry (Allen) patronizes her misgivings...
Since Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. in 1924, Hollywood has often toyed with the looking-glass motif, though never on Hero's mammoth scale, where so many cars crash that the audience becomes rubberneckers. Schwarzenegger, a live- action cartoon in the flesh, and McTiernan, who made the brains explode on time in Die Hard, might seem just the team to send up the dizzy conventions of the action genre. At first they do so, smartly. A wounded cop mutters, "Two days to retirement," and promptly dies. And Arnold's version of Hamlet is even funnier than Mel Gibson...