Word: pupils
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Bryan Singer, whose last film was the crisply devious crime thriller The Usual Suspects, has narrowed his focus from that film's gang of five to a two-hander in Apt Pupil, from a Stephen King story. The other three directors have bought a big canvas (at a cut rate) and splashed strange people on it till it's as busy as a Bruegel. Solondz has a dozen major characters trudging through Happiness. Stanley Tucci, the co-writer, co-director and star of everyone's favorite Italian-food film, Big Night, has created a shipful of fools in his farce...
...MCKELLEN Apt Pupil; Gods and Monsters...
...with leading roles in two ambitious thrillers, Sir Ian, 59, must face the inconvenience of movie stardom. In Gods and Monsters, he is James Whale, the director of Frankenstein, who in his last days seeks a young man to ease his roiling soul. In the Stephen King tale Apt Pupil, he plays an aged Nazi, living incognito in California, who is forced into an uneasy alliance with a curious teenager. McKellen is the soul of pained grace in one film, the spirit of caged evil in the other; but both reveal an actor totally at ease with the camera...
This put him in conflict with his coach, the almost equally legendary Bill Bowerman (Sutherland), no mean athletic aesthetician himself. He's presented as a more forgiving and gently eccentric kind of obsessive, disapproving of his pupil's stubborn individuality but also watchfully guarding a passion for excellence that matches his own. Theirs is a marvelously subtle wrangle: Prefontaine ran Bowerman's race in the 5,000 m at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and was beaten; but it was Bowerman who brought him back from self-pity (and maybe self-destruction) and onto the comeback trail before Prefontaine was killed...
Dwelling in the sulfurously lighted basement apartment of Simon's house, Henry is the Devil--a devil, anyway--with a gift for inspiring those he does not repel. An apt pupil, Simon composes a long poem that some people hate ("Drop dead," reads a publisher's rejection note; "keep your day job") but others champion. Simon becomes a literary celebrity, and in gratitude to his mentor says he will insist that his publisher also issue Henry's opus. Then, alas, he reads...