Word: kid
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...consecutive weeks back in December 1972, the Palomar production company and 20th Century-Fox teamed to release two films: Sleuth and The Heartbreak Kid. Now, on consecutive weekends in October 2007, come remakes of those movies. As it happens, the original Sleuth and Heartbreak were smart and funny and took a fairly brutal view of their main characters. The remakes, though honoring the basic plots of their predecessors, are dumb, witless and humiliating to all parties...
...appeal to a teen audience, how shades of gray have been coarsened to simple blacks and whites, how everything then was better than anything now, etc. etc. That alterkocker argument might be made to apply to the Farrelly brothers' dumb-down of the Neil Simon-Elaine May Heartbreak Kid, which I was unkind to last week. But it doesn't work on Sleuth, an art-house effort with more modest box office aspirations, a much loftier collection of talent, on and off screen - and, you'd think, an unwreckable scenario...
Anyone who follows the news probably has a picture of the typical steroid user: an elite athlete - a home-run hitter, say - trying to get an edge on the competition, or a high-school or college kid who wants desperately to get into the pros...
...three winners of this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine are eminent scientists, but Mario Capecchi is the one with the spiral-staircase story: the starving, homeless Italian street kid who found his way to America, to Harvard, to Utah, ever the refugee, before finally arriving at eternal glory and the Nobel Prize. It's in many ways a familiar tale, Oliver Twist meets Albert Einstein, the pilgrim who comes to the promised land expecting, as he says, "the roads to be paved in gold. What I found actually was just opportunity." But his story also has enough nice serrated...
Advice to a would-be novelist: write what you know. Tip for a first-time director: show what you've seen. Ben Affleck has been living in the tabloids for so long, it might seem as if he had been born there. But no, he's a Boston kid, and for his debut in the auteur sweepstakes, he wisely chose a Dennis Lehane suspense novel set in the down-and-dirty Boston suburb of Dorchester...