Word: tolkin
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That was a very distant time. Today, film directors prefer to make movies based on old movies, not plumb the pools of their own artistry. Hollywood looks back, not inward. Nine, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago) and scripted by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) and Michael Tolkin (The Player), wants to do both: engage in a little navel-gazing while summoning the glories of Italian cinema in the Cinecitta era of the 1960s. Find a role for Sophia Loren! Cast Kidman as an amalgam of Claudia Cardinale and Anita Ekberg! And, just as anachronistic, have people sing their troubles...
...hiding. Altman moved to the side streets, to the movie equivalent of off-Broadway, to fashion his next career: as the formidable director of stage plays on film and videotape (10 of them, from 1982 to 1988). In 1992 he stormed back from exile with The Player, writer Michael Tolkin's vivid, genial satire of the movie industry's knack for corrupting American optimism and ingenuity - by which time a system of indie distributors was in place to bankroll Altman's more ambitious projects and return him to the mainstream of American movies' minor stream...
...ways in which writers Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin escalate the conflict often bend plausibility, and director Roger Michell sometimes kicks the melodrama into fantasyland. But at heart this parable, well acted by a veteran cast, is one of those serious "gerund movies" (Pushing Tin, Falling Down) about the scars we leave on the folks we dash past in our rush to do our job. Their world disintegrates, and all we notice, for a second, is the puff of smoke behind...
...course, not all Y2K troubles are of the man-made variety. Plenty of people believe that 2000 means the end of a lot more than just your operating system, and in The Rapture, writer-director Michael (The Player) Tolkin seriously wonders if maybe they aren't right. Starring Mimi Rogers back when she was better known as Mrs. Tom Cruise and a pre-Mulder David Duchovny, the film takes a long, serious look at the possibility that the Book of Revelation is literally correct. Rogers is great as the born-again mother whose crisis of faith causes...
...murder on her mind from the first of her 23 novels, the 1950 Strangers on a Train. Alfred Hitchcock made a 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...