Word: neverlands
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...first of the biopics, Finding Neverland, revels in the warm fantasy world of childhood, an inviting escape for today’s world-weary audiences. The film is fiercely emotional—Johnny Depp’s J.M. Barrie must face fatal disease, domestic discord, and a devastating death—but the action is safely removed from us, both temporally and geographically. The travails of an aristocrat in fin-de-siècle Britain may make for stellar entertainment, but they cannot engage the pressing issues of our contemporary culture...
...office numbers show that Ray more closely resonated with American audiences, grossing about $30 million more than Neverland. But Taylor Hackford’s film, despite Jamie Foxx’s soon-to-be-Oscar-winning performance, offers an easy way out. It mixes clichés of cultural nostalgia with the classic American tale of rags-to-riches. Comforting, perhaps, but somewhat trite in an age of wholesale corporate layoffs and a widening divide between bourgeois and blue-collar. If anything, the film offers a longing glimpse into a world we no longer possess: many have noted that...
This leaves Sideways and Million Dollar Baby, the year’s requisite realist duo. Both feature a raw, devastating naturalism; they are far and away the most mature offerings on the Oscar docket. But while Ray and Neverland stay too distant from the viewer, these pictures cut too close to the bone. Sideways is an apt parable of its time, a tale of failure, loss, and botched hedonism. That mix is a bit too real in the era of outsourcing and Dennis Kozlowski. And for Academy voters in Hollywood, the casual alcoholism and bungled love affairs could seem more...
...beloved book for young people, Little Women: The Musical is the most adult new musical of the Broadway season and an unexpectedly satisfying meal. Skillfully adapted from Louisa May Alcott's novel by Allan Knee (author of The Man Who Was Peter Pan, on which the film Finding Neverland is based), it reintroduces us to the four March sisters, marooned in their Massachusetts home while their father is off to the Civil War. Directed by Susan H. Schulman (The Secret Garden), the show is pretty, unpretentious, warmhearted but surprisingly restrained: even the death of Beth, the quiet sister felled...
...Finding Neverland...