Word: muse
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This time Brooks plays a screenwriter, Steven Phillips, who, as everyone keeps telling him, has lost his edge. What he needs is a muse, who turns out to be a bubble-headed material girl (well played by Sharon Stone) who requires gifts from Tiffany in exchange for dopily delphic advice. The conceit is mildly amusing, but what Brooks actually seems to have lost is his comic rhythm. There's something distant and depressed about the film, which never develops the momentum it needs to link its occasional bright satiric moments into a convincing whole...
Resolves that the Latin tongue should be spoken, and that the garrulous Muse, as if recalled from exile, should at last be restored to her former prestige...
...nothing to do with millionaires or prostitutes. It gets better. Will Smith kicks off July Fourth weekend with the wacky Wild Wild West. Need a new superhero? Try Mystery Men, with Ben Stiller and Geoffrey Rush as defunct superheroes. Need a testosterone boost? Check out Sharon Stone in The Muse, a new comedy from Albert Brooks. For animaniacs, there's Tarzan and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (love that title). With so many movies and so little time, forget work and head towards the theaters. May you choose wisely and may the, um, Force be with...
Winterson's less poetic efforts suffer from lapses into sentimental philosophizing, as if she momentarily invokes the Hallmark Muse. I'm all for stories that convey basic truths about humanity, but I'm against the author obtrusively pointing them out for me. I'm not even sure I know what a platitude like "The future is still intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable" from the story "Orion" means. Are our futures really that predetermined? And of course "the past is irredeemable"--It's already happened; it's gone. It's tautologies like that that make me lash...
With Shakespeare in Love, we find Fiennes as the title character searching for a muse to stir up his creative juices. Paltrow is just the ticket as she employs the ol' Victor/Victoria trick to gender bend her way onto the stage and into Fiennes' heart. The adultery angle doesn't really do it for me, but Tom Stoppard, the screenwriter, deftly weaves Shakespeare's elegant language with his own poetic words. If the Scarlet Letter duo don't affect you, at least the verbal swordplay will keep you interested till...