Word: screens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Aniston makes the transition to big screen smoothly enough by doing the same stuff that's made her so popular with TV audiences: the Rachel mannerisms, the Rachel smile and above all, the Rachel cluelessness about affairs of the heart. Combined with the slightness of the plot, the whole movie plays like an extended episode of "Friends," minus the other five characters...
...Nauvoo I stopped at the church-run visitors center, up the hill from the restored historic district. The place had changed since I had seen it as a kid. Installed below a towering statue of a decidedly muscular Christ were several video monitors equipped with touch screens. Each screen had a menu of philosophical questions. I selected "What is the purpose of life?" although I was tempted to cut to the chase by touching "Is there life after death?" Instantly a robotic male voice answered, "To see if we will follow the plan of our Heavenly Father, each...
...spent another half an hour at the screen, taking advantage of its forthright answers to a veritable maze of cosmic quandaries. As a teenager I had appreciated such certainties; as an adult I was tempted to make fun of them. My secular college professors had insisted that truth is always complicated, relative, but I still felt the tug of religious absolutism. Watching a woman in a wheelchair beside me earnestly punching up answers on her screen, I concluded I was not alone...
Godard has always been a canny guerrilla. He knows that film is an expensive art, that someone must subsidize his midnight raids on the prevailing culture. So he subverts the typical narrative by using all the handsome old tools. Contempt has movie stars, guns, car crashes, wide screen, beautiful color, the cliffs of Capri, the most rapturous music (by Georges Delerue, his violins sawing and soaring like Philip Glass in ecstasy). And, always, pretty women. A Ziegfeld of the Left Bank, Godard reinvented Jean Seberg and discovered Anna Karina, Juliet Berto, Maruschka Detmers, Myriem Roussel, Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy--glories...
...watched (and cried at the end of) It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart [APPRECIATION, July 14]. And no imaginary friend seems so real as the invisible rabbit Harvey. Stewart has been my favorite for years, and as you pointed out, his life both on and off the screen has been a reason for high admiration for this actor. I will miss him. MAVIS MOON San Jose, Calif...