Word: wilderness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nostalgic no more. The old form is alive--with a nice femme kick--in British writer-director John McKay's Crush. The film bubbles with acid wit, in the tradition of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, while simmering with the ache of lust pursued and love lost. Pleasanter still, it provides a career-defining role for its all-American star, Andie MacDowell, who's been nibbling at the edges of moviegoers' attention for 20 years and now gets to stand center screen, tall and gorgeous. Combined with her stalwart turn in Elie Chouraqui's Harrison's Flowers, as a journalist...
Temperamentally, Wilder was a conservative. As a writer, he partnered with Charles Brackett for 15 films over a dozen years (1938-50) and with I.A.L. Diamond for 12 films over a quarter-century (1957-81). He stayed married to the same woman for more than a half-century. He remained true as well to his mordant muse, both when his movies were acclaimed hits and later, when they tanked at the box office. Fashions changed; he didn't. A Wilder script was always recognizable by its adamantine dazzle, whether in 1931 Berlin (Emil and the Detectives) or 1981 Los Angeles...
Hollywood profited from Wilder's voice, mimicked it in films by lesser artists and finally consigned it to retirement. The old pro watched a new generation--the "kids with beards"--come to power, yet he kept going to the office, planning scripts, dreaming schemes. Only toward the end did he acknowledge that his big carnival ride was over. At a 1997 testimonial he told the story of an old man who informs his doctor that he can no longer pee. The doctor's diagnosis: "You've peed enough...
Today American movies are sadly and irrevocably bereft of Billy Wilder's misanthropic humanism and sparkling wit. Now that's enough to make you cynical...
DIED. BILLY WILDER, 95, sardonic, much honored Hollywood director of such films as Sunset Blvd. and Some Like It Hot; in Beverly Hills, Calif. (see page...