Cinema

THE URGE TO EMBRACE "Gods and Generals" is so strong as to be almost overwhelming. It is a beautiful, serious movie about the Civil War that holds tight to the trail of truth. It is well acted and scrupulously made. Anyone who has recently suffered through Hollywoodized history--Pearl Harbor, "The Messenger," "Thirteen Days"--will surely run to "Gods and Generals" if for no other reason than director Ronald Maxwell gets things right.

No small achievement, that.

THE FIRST THING you need to remember when going into a Martin Scorsese film is that it'll probably be long. Get food and drink. Go to the bathroom. Wear comfortable clothing. In fact, the last movie Scorsese made under 2 hours was released in 1986 ("The Color of Money," at 119 minutes). Ever since then, his epics have averaged a running time of 2 hours and 20 minutes (his longest is 1995's "Casino," at 2:58). His second-longest film?

IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN Jerry Seinfeld's movie, "Comedian," you should. If it's not playing near you, or if it's no longer playing anywhere, buy the video when it hits the stores. Watch it often, buy several more, and give them to your friends, especially anyone who's ever said, "Ooh, I love 'Survivor.' Wouldn't miss it." Then insist that they pick up a bunch themselves and give them to their friends.

Show it to your children just before they go off to college.

I AM APPALLED by my journalistic colleagues' failure to fully exploit the Liesel Pritzker story. Once upon a time, the American media knew how to treat beautiful heiresses--exhaustively. They were our royalty. Now it's Jennifer Lopez. That represents a profound shift in our culture (I would say that, wouldn't I).

Let's review: The Pritzkers are one of the richest families in the world. The Chicago-based family's assets include Hyatt Hotels, Royal Carribbean Cruises, the Pritzker Realty Group, and a couple of casinos. The Pritzker Prize is one of architecture's loftiest awards.

THE REAL STAR of "Frida," the much-hyped film biography of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, is not Salma Hayek, the beautiful Arab-Mexican actress who handles the lead role, but Mexico--in all its legendry, folklore, and intensity of color and passion. Mexico has remained in large part untouched by the globalization of architectural dullness, and it provides the film a setting so magnificent it almost overcomes the film's tendentiousness.

So, too, the real subject of "Frida" is not Kahlo as she actually was, but Kahlo as she has become since her death: a global feminist icon.

Word has it that Mae West—that "plumber’s idea of Cleopatra," as W.C. Fields once wise-cracked—haunts her Hollywood estate; her reflection has been seen in the mirrors that in life she approached with the concentration of a card shark. In a world of haves and have-nots, West knew any man could be had; she called them all "suckers." As Broadway’s bad girl who brought her play Sex to the stage and then as a Hollywood newcomer who at age forty broke box-office records set by Garbo and Dietrich, she shrewdly stuck to her winning formula.

HOLLYWOOD HAS ALWAYS RUN ON THE PRINCIPLE that what worked before must work again—and again and again and again, in movie after movie, until theatergoers reach the point of throwing things at the screen. The most recent example of mindless repetition is gravity-defying martial arts. And the time has come to clip its wings.

"Wire work," as it is called in the film world, involves harnessing actors and suspending them from thin cables high in the air.

I WAS SURPRISED TO READ in the newspaper the other day that the movie star Russell Crowe has just concluded a month-long tour with his rock ’n’ roll band, a group of Australians called "30 Odd Foot of Grunts." I was surprised for reasons that had nothing to do with the stupid name. I didn’t know Russell Crowe was on tour, for one thing; and I didn’t know Russell Crowe had a band. I wouldn’t have thought it necessary for him to have a band.

By any objective standard, he is a man who has won the decathlon of human existence.

THE MAN FROM GLAAD

THROUGH THE YEARS, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)—the jackboot division of the gay community—has displayed a gift for publicity-seeking, whether breathlessly chronicling the media appearances of Ellen DeGeneres, counting the number of gay characters on Dawson’s Creek ("Jack continues to be out and proud at Capeside High"), or attacking the likes of Mel Gibson and Dr. Laura for homophobia. At the same time, GLAAD has operated as a behind-the-scenes pressure group with a surprising amount of success influencing the content of TV shows and movies.

IF YOU’VE SEEN THE PREVIEWS or read the Hollywood hype, then you know that this summer’s latest blockbuster, Planet of the Apes, is a movie that asks its viewers deep, deep questions. Across America, we’ve been warned for months that director Tim Burton—famous for his lushly dark versions of Batman and Sleepy Hollow—had taken a semi-schlock film from 1968 and remade it into a powerful allegory of man’s inhumanity to man and bestiality to beast.

There’s just one problem: It isn’t true.

THE DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY had a dream one night as he considered how to film an epic movie about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In his dream, he followed a bomb, falling from a plane, as it descended ever more rapidly to crash into the deck of a ship. He awakened, gripped with an obsession to realize his vision on film. And in the mammoth new Pearl Harbor, Bay's vision is realized.

One hesitates to burden entertainment with philosophical baggage. The great majority of moviegoers are wisely after the mindless pleasure of the thing. They don't want Kierkegaard's Either/Or. They want respite from worry, work, and the occasional screaming kid.

Yet some books and movies don't make sense without the baggage, and so it is with the newly released film Hannibal, made from Thomas Harris's novel of the same title. Issued in the spring of 1999, Harris's book was the publishing event of the year.