Word: wayward
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Think Chaplin, who once said that all he needed to be funny was a park, a policeman and a pretty girl. Think Keaton, who once did a brilliant special-effects comedy, (Sherlock, Jr.) , where you were almost unaware of his very subtle camera tricks. Think Grant, Hepburn and their wayward leopard. For that matter, think Something About Mary, which pretty much took place in a cramped apartment. The minute the effects budget swells, it starts to crush the life out of comedy, which needs empty spaces to roam and some quality alone with the audiences in order to enlist...
...into the future. The question is, will filmmakers ever learn theirs? Conceptually, Click contains the faint possibility of a certain rueful elegance. That universal remote is a technologically (and psychologically) hip way to lead him (and us) into what amounts to a near-universal fantasy - push-button control over wayward life. Imagine it as a kind of updated version of the ghosts who enabled Scrooge to envision Christmases past, present and future and ride his time warp into to a state of grace. It also offers an efficient way for Michael to experience a morally instructive alternative reality...
...without directorial comment or commitment. He's no more than a technician, fearful, it seems, of intruding too heavily on Keillor's territory. But that territory is, in this case, essentially undefended by its founder-proprietor. It is waiting for someone, something, to grant its people felt and wayward lives. If A Prairie Home Companion functions at all it is as a performance film - some of the songs, though not particularly well shot, are at least lively. But that's not enough. Streep's work aside, you can pretty much get all that's worth having out of the film...
...Here is another wayward film with huge ambitions and, as yet, no notion of taming them...
...days earlier, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), which is fighting for a separate Tamil state, had killed 17 Sri Lankan navymen in a suicide attack. So the murder of the Ketheeswarans, who were ethnic Tamils living near a naval base, was viewed by some as revenge by wayward sailors. Others saw it differently: some supporters of the Tigers blamed rival Tamils; an aide to President Mahinda Rajapakse spoke of unspecified forces "trying to discredit the President"; and Sinhalese nationalists even suggested the Tigers had killed their own to justify future attacks. To make sense of the latest fighting...