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A bunch of new movie preReviews are up; allow me to shamelessly self-plug and steer you towards my entries on Man on Fire, Peter Pan, and The Day After Tomorrow. The Peter Pan post is so topical I'm going to put up an excerpt here.
Remember the front page "asteroid hitting earth" stories that happened a few months before Deep Impact and Armageddon came out? Or the giant shark hooked off Montauk Point the summer Jaws 2 was released? (OK, the latter did happen, or they said it happened, but no reason you should know or remember it.) Call me a cynic, but I find it very strange that the media is gearing up for a Michael Jackson arrest frenzy just as Peter Pan is hitting theaters.The theory is, the film studio gives the DA a wad of cash to prosecute the suit, which will be very costly for the state, in exchange for wide dissemination of the lost boys/Never-Neverland meme at a time when a film about same, which doesn't look very good, is coming out. Sales of Jackson product will also increase. Lots of bucks at stake here. But of course Hollywood (filmmaking, law enforcement) could never be that corrupt. Or could it?
Also, while Sally McKay's preReview of Bridge on the River Kwai is well written and funny, the film must be defended as a kind of classic '60s antihero story. It's much more nuanced than you would think. True, there's a commando raid to blow up the bridge but for most of the movie's length Alec Guinness is keeping his fellow POWs sane by building the bridge. He wins a moral victory over the Japanese by showcasing British engineering skills and "stiff upper lip" resolve under demoralizing circumstances. (The film's ethnic politics still aren't very enlightened.) The problem is, he has so much pride in his work he nearly foils the commandos' mission. The latter must kill one of their own to make up for his pigheaded folly. Guinness' penetrating look when he's searching for evidence of sabotage and his mask of pain when he realizes what an idiot he's been are just unforgettable. The bridge, which would have been a real asset to the Southeast Asian locale after the war, is of course blown up, and when the POWs' physician surveys the ruined structure and all the bodies of principal characters lying around his only words are "Madness. Madness." (The last line of the film.) A more detailed synopsis is here.
Thanks to Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes for mentioning this page as an example of online art-writing. I've been enjoying his, too. In another recent post he mentions his dislike of John Currin and mocks the inevitable hagiographic Kimmelman review in the Times. Kimmelman invokes Paul Cadmus and I think that's exactly right: both artists are acerbically witty, with old master polish, but "minor" or "genre" figures. The difference is Currin's canvases are sold as the current high-priced ($400,000) "cutting edge": that's disturbing because it shows how retrograde the collector sensibility has become. Currin's work is mildly transgressive, eminently collectible, and assures the continuity of a certain line of American painting in museum collections: Sargent, Hopper, Cadmus, Tooker, Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, John Currin. Avant gardes come and go, modernist and postmodernist trends seem faddish, but the Painterly Tradition is preserved. John C, I hope you're very proud.