Word: witnessing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...movie, faithful in spirit to the book, is something else. It is, in the best sense, a travesty, a masquerade, a cross-dressing comedy of eros. Yet moviegoers do believe in Orlando, in the breadth of its canvas, the immediacy of its emotions, the palliative power of its wit. They can swim in its gorgeous images: the fruit seen below a sheath of ice, the oars dipping into dark water, the fearful maiden rushing between high hedges and across battlefields. They surely believe in Swinton as the pearl and perfection of any gender; her poise and gravity, and the drama...
...from dysfunction; you don't want it leaping across the footlights to land, falsely grinning, falsely ingratiating, in your lap. But it is, of course, precisely the camera's business to facilitate such leaps. Even so, if these people had any real charm, if their oddity were cloaked in wit, if their rather chilly creator brought some real compassion to these sealed-off lives, we might take them more readily to heart. If they suggested some generalized insights about lower-middle-class life, we might more readily forgive their dreary excesses. And if wishing could make it so, Neil Simon...
...worth -- as "Norm's evil twin." There isn't even that much difference between Wendt's characters. The guys gathered to roast in the tribal sweat lodge and discover the "wild men" within are losers, not predators, full of thwarted yearning and silly sweetness. One moment rises to real wit: a dream sequence in which a neglected son of a rich man summons his father, only to find the old man is as usual too busy and has sent a surrogate...
...commercial viability came with last season's best musical, Falsettos, which centers on a father who leaves his wife and son to take up with a male lover who dies of AIDS. While it sounds grim, the show is in large part a cheerfully neurotic comedy; its mordant wit in the face of death is yet another index of a gay aesthetic. The producers have shrewdly emphasized the show's celebration of families of all kinds in testimonial ads touting it as fit for rabbis and priests, Midwestern tourists and suburban firemen. Having long since turned a profit on Broadway...
Well, it works. This isn't the best Shakespeare on film -- a photo finish between Olivier's Richard III and Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight -- but it may be the best movie Shakespeare. The skirmish of will and wit between Benedick (Branagh, never so charming a screen presence) and Beatrice (his wife Emma Thompson, here tart and intense) plays like a prime episode of Cheers. The characters' passions seem not revived but experienced afresh. There is wrenching melodrama in the perfidy that estranges the innocent lovers Hero (Kate Beckinsale) and Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard, a wonderfully vulnerable puppy-lover...