Word: kingsley
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Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night with his novel, The White Tiger, joining a pantheon of past Booker winners that includes such literary giants as V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and Salman Rushdie. It was a remarkable victory for Adiga, a 33-year-old first-time novelist who spent part of his youth in the Indian city of Mangalore and now lives in Bombay. As an old friend of his, I was sitting at the table with Adiga in London's Guildhall when he won, surrounded by people from his U.K. publishing house...
This is not a matter David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) particularly likes to dwell on. And why should he? He's a fit man in his sixties, a Columbia professor and a minor "public intellectual" (hateful phrase, that one) in New York. (Indeed, the film opens with him in conversation with Charlie Rose, who does an excellent imitation of himself.) Dave has a convenient, purely sexual relationship with Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), who gives a lovely, knowing performance as a woman of a certain age. He has a good friendship with a poet named George (a wise and excellent Dennis Hopper). Polymathically...
...that the result of this conflict can only be the terrible muddle that finally elbows aside the previously preoccupying sexual shambles. That's especially true of The Dying Animal, when mortality settles on the wrong person at the wrong time. There are things wrong with Coixet's movie. Ben Kingsley is, of course, a fine actor, but in this instance there seems to me something smug, held back, in his work. Roth's Kepesh, at least for a time, has more spritzing fun with his minor celebrity life than Kingsley's does. The latter seems insufficiently surprised and confused...
...Professor has affair with lovely grad student: we've heard that one before. So had Philip Roth, whose novel The Dying Animal is acutely attuned to the dissonance of May-December love. This fine film has a touching performance by Penélope Cruz and a great one by Ben Kingsley. Cue the Oscar buzz...
Frozen River Written and directed by Courtney Hunt; rated R; out now August isn't usually a month for Academy Award--worthy acting, but the Kingsley raves have been joined by tributes to Melissa Leo's work in this Sundance Festival winner. She's superb as a harried single mom who gets involved in running illegals across the Canadian border. The film matches Leo's desperate tenseness to create a spare, absorbing melodrama...