Word: weir
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...want to sing out, in one of Carrey's trademark siren wails. As dreamed up by screenwriter Andrew Niccol and realized to sunnily subversive perfection by director Peter Weir, The Truman Show is so verdant with metaphor and emotion that it works on any viewer's level. You will laugh. You will cry. You will be provoked to ask yourself why you feel this way. And for once in a blue moon of movies, you will think. Isn't that one of the best buzzes you can get leaving a multiplex...
...that purports to be a TV show and that we (along with everyone else but Truman) know is fake. Occasionally we watch "viewers" of the show, in their home or a bar, reacting to some dramatic moment. And at times we watch Christof and his crew directing the show. Weir, like his alter ego Christof, lays the process of magicmaking and manipulation open before us. Here's how we do it, people: music and mirrors...
...quibble with Weir's editing; the movie cops out on greatness with a few truckling reaction shots at the climax. And one can question Niccol's vision of the future of TV: not 500 channels nattering to niche markets but one big show binding the world in the bogus bliss of pink-cheeked Americana. And the idea of a program uninterrupted by commercials (Christof makes his money from product placement and ancillary markets) is nearly as naive as Truman. The show is also pretty tame. Unlike most daytime-drama characters, Truman is a faithful husband who has no evil twin...
...TRUMAN SHOW (June 5). Truman Burbank is the only man on earth who doesn't know he's the star of a popular 24-hour soap opera. As Truman, Jim Carrey inhabits director Peter Weir's bogus universe with a heroic gentility. But will Carrey's rowdy fans skip Truman? Or will the audience that might appreciate an adult parable stay home because, hey, it's just a Jim Carrey movie? One industry savant says not to worry: this canny film will reach both groups and gross $200 million...
This evening kicks off "Imagining the Aborigine: Australian Movies Since the Second World War," a three-day film retrospective at the Harvard Film Archives. Curated by John Rickard, Harvard's visiting Professor of Australian Studies, the series features (among many others) Peter Weir's The Last Wave and Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout, as well as several documentaries about Aborigine-European encounters on this island continent. Put some shrimps on the barbie and stroll down to the basement of the Carpeneter Center to check out these cinematic gems...