Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Adapted from Mark Childress' 1993 critically-acclaimed novel of the same name, Crazy in Alabama is at times brilliantly poignant in its portrayal of the fight for civil rights and at other times utterly inane when it comes to any scene that involves its main character, Lucille (Melanie Griffith). Its paradoxical blend of intense drama and absurd comedy accomplishes the daunting task of uniting two seemingly disparate storylines by a common cause: the fight for freedom, whether from an entire society or a controlling spouse. Crazy in Alabama juxtaposes the fallout of two murders in a small Alabama town...
Earth, the second film in director Deepa Mehta's prospective trilogy Fire, Earth and Water, tells the tragic story of the 1947 partition of India as witnessed by Lenny Sethna (Maia Sethna), an 8 year-old Parsee girl. Based on Bapsi Sidwha's novel Cracking India, Earth explores the controversial British partition of India into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, which caused inter-religious massacres by the same Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who had lived together peacefully for many years. Lahore, the city in which Lenny lives, was the site of a particularly bloody confrontation reflective of the widespread atrocities...
Breakfast of Champions is none of these books. The movie was doomed from the beginning. This ill-conceived, ill-fated and horrendously-executed adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s cult classic novel of the same name follows the fleeting sanity of Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis), the owner of a used-car dealership and the most popular guy in Midland City. The film also follows Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney), a slightly kooky science-fiction writer on his way to Midland City to attend the town's Fine Arts Festival as the guest of honor. When the divergent paths of these...
...mood of the film doesn't help the matter. Defined by the triteness of the setting (a generic middle-America suburb/commercial center) and the over-exaggerated antics of the actors, the tone is downright campy, a far cry from the insightful and sharply satirical mood of the novel. Bruce Willis as Dwayne Hoover takes an unfortunate step backwards from his performance in The Sixth Sense by making a complete ass of himself. (Perhaps this is a sign that he should go back to doing Die Hard-type fare.) The rampant television commercials advertising Dwayne's cars? Mind-numbingly annoying...
...People loved the novel because of its tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic candor and because of its simple acknowledgement of a world going mad. It was a wacky satire that sparred with issues of societal conformity and rampant consumerism. The movie takes the consumerism slant and clubs you over the head with it repeatedly--so repeatedly, in fact, that you lose sight of its importance. It takes the essential plot elements of the novel and blurs them together to create two hours of incoherent nonsense. In short, director Alan Rudolph's vision of Vonnegut's cynical tale boasts all the clarity...