Word: tolkin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
Peter and Katherine (Peter Weller and Judy Davis) are bored and careless. They lose jobs, take on lovers, futz around with guru-driven spirituality and dress to the nines. You could argue, as writer-director Michael Tolkin doubtless did when he was pitching The New Age, that they are perfect exemplars of chic anomie as it manifests itself in postmodern -- or postrational -- Los Angeles. You could also argue, as people whose malls don't yet contain an Issey Miyake boutique might, that they are hopeless twits...
...possible that Tolkin, who in 1992 adapted his own novel, The Player, for the screen, harbored satirical hopes for this project. But as a director he lacks the antic eye that (often enough to keep us interested) rescues Robert Altman from depression and pretension. Tolkin just doesn't know how to position himself -- far enough from his characters to make fun of them, close enough to them to retain our sympathy. And the question of whether they will make a go of Hipocracy, the upmarket clothing store they decide to open, is not a compelling one. Shopkeeping cannot compare...
...children and facing at mid-life a personal or career crisis that reminds boomers of the need for moorings. "You have to start thinking about God in the face of how to raise children in a society that has lost all connection to God," says Hollywood screenwriter- director Michael Tolkin, 42. He has ended up a more prayerful Jew than his liberal parents after seeking religious training for his children...