Word: memoir
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Midwest bureau chief Ron Stodghill was co-author of Mfume's 1996 memoir No Free Ride
...need bother mocking or pitying the Irish; they do such a good job of it themselves. Frank McCourt beautifully juggled contempt and sympathy in his memoir of growing up poor and wet in Limerick in the '30s and '40s, before squandering the goodwill he had accrued with the taint of 'Tis (it'll be a while before that sour screed is filmed). Parker, who did right by the Irish in The Commitments, has a go at the impossible task of adapting Angela's Ashes and trying to satisfy all those who loved the book so much that McCourt's painful...
...that director (and final-draft writer) James Mangold has botched the job. It's just that he made something rather conventional out of a memoir that was spare, terse and elliptically funny. And naturally, the film's attitude toward its patients is the only acceptable one these days: that they may be saner than their keepers--especially since this is the '60s, when the outside world is so crazy...
...health. Jolie is more problematic as her best friend, an overt rebel whose assertiveness leads to the movie's most tragic--and heavily fictionalized--passage. There is something tiresome in her toughness. But that's emblematic of the whole movie, which misses what was most engaging about Kaysen's memoir--the unique sound of her voice, mostly drowned out here by too familiar attitudes and melodrama...
...director, Alan Parker, worked with Laura Jones to write the screenplay, and the film is very faithful to the book--too faithful, perhaps. Like a complex organ hymn being plinked out on an electric keyboard, the film plays the same basic melody as the memoir but fails to bring out the nuances of McCourt's writing, while these nuances are precisely what made Angela's Ashes a great work rather than a mere string of anecdotes...