Word: thrillers
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That contradiction is not lost on Hollywood. "Porcelain isn't fine enough to describe how fragile she is," says director Philip Noyce, who nevertheless cast her as a feisty policewoman opposite Denzel Washington in last fall's hit thriller The Bone Collector. "She's not burned out with the joy of performing. She's in her element because she can set parameters for a character, whereas I suspect she doesn't know her own boundaries emotionally and physically. I suspect she's happiest when she's not being Angelina Jolie...
Here's an unlikely bit of news for an election year: politically, Gary Hart is dead, but Che Guevara isn't. O.K., so it's a little more complicated than that. Che is the hero of a just released political thriller from John Blackthorn, whose Sins of the Fathers was a mild success last year. Like the earlier book, I, Che Guevara (William Morrow; 369 pages; $24) is set in Cuba and carries a tantalizing tease on the book jacket: "John Blackthorn is the pseudonym of a political figure whose name is well known in international capitals and intelligence circles...
...ideal irredeemably corrupted by money, cynicism and campaign trickery. Here, his fictional hero is his mouthpiece. Hart could have eliminated the middleman--Che, in this case--and written a straightforward tract on his theory of radical democracy. Sure enough: "That's my next book," he says. But without a thriller wrapped around them--and without John Blackthorn--his ideas may be a tougher sell...
...film of it a year later, though he dared include only one of the book's two murders. Soon after, the woman whom screenwriter Michael Tolkin (The Player) calls "our best expatriate since Henry James" left for Europe, where she was welcomed as an important novelist, not just a thriller writer. From this pleasant remove, she wrote of another ruthlessly imaginative expat, Tom Ripley...
...sure, there is something a little quixotic about following up a picture on war-ravaged 1940's Tuscany with one on jazz-happy 1950's Rome. But I'm delighted that Minghella is so insistent upon bringing us Italy in ravishing color. A spoonful of Italian sugar makes the thriller go down so easy that one wonders whether the ghost of Federico Fellini wasn't smiling on this one. Why not? Thomas Ripley isn't really all that different from Fellini's heroines: like, say, Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria. They are just two lost idealists looking...