Posted on May 17, 2014 at 8:00 am
Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner star in this new Disney film based on one of my favorite books by one of my favorite people. The book has already been filmed twice, once as an animated musical with songs by “Annie’s” Charles Strouse. It looks like the whole family has a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day in this one.
Until it is released this fall, read the book and enjoy this version.
Posted on April 26, 2014 at 3:59 pm
Two smart, shrewd, and very funny women have written books about their lives in show business. Judy Greer has played the heroine’s best friend in romantic comedies like “13 Going on 30,” “27 Dresses,” and “Love Happens.” She has made memorable appearances in “Arrested Development,” “The Big Bang Theory,” and “Modern Family.” In small parts in “The Descendents” and “Love and Other Drugs,” she showed exceptional range and sensitivity. She is one of those familiar faces. And so she titled her book I Don’t Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star
Carol Leifer is a comic, actress, and writer who was the inspiration for the character of Elaine on “Seinfeld.” Her book, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying
Posted on April 21, 2014 at 8:00 am
Fifty years after Stanley Kubrick began work on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the ultimate behind-the-scenes story will be out next month in a limited edition $750 four-volume history by Piers Bizony, an expert on both Kubrick and space exploration.
Made in exclusive collaboration with the Kubrick estate and Warner Bros., this copiously illustrated work features hundreds of unique 2oo1-related documents, concept artworks, and superb behind-the-scenes photographs from the Kubrick Archives—most of which have never been published before—as well as exclusive correspondence and personal testimony from Kubrick’s co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke.
The four volumes include:Film stills, new behind the scenes interviews with lead actors, senior production designers, and key special-effects experts, a facsimile of the original screenplay and 1965 production notes, a box cover painted by Wayne Haag, and “a small comic surprise.”
Posted on April 15, 2014 at 3:59 pm
“Heaven is for Real” opens tomorrow, with Greg Kinnear as Todd Burpo, a Nebraska pastor whose four-year-old son says that he visited heaven during surgery for a ruptured appendix. It is based on a best-selling book Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back
talked about looking down to see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.
In heaven, Colton met his miscarried sister whom no one ever had told him about and his great-grandfather who died 30 years before Colton was born. He shared impossible-to-know details about each. Colton went on to describe the horse that only Jesus could ride, about how “reaaally big” God and his chair are, and how the Holy Spirit “shoots down power” from heaven to help us.
The movie follows the essential elements of the book pretty closely. The Burpos dismiss Colton’s description of heaven at first. But when he describes where they were during the operation, identifies the great-grandfather who died before he was born and the sister his mother miscarried as people he met and spoke to, they are persuaded that he saw something real.
Posted on April 12, 2014 at 3:50 pm
In honor of the 40th anniversary of Peter Benchley’s Jaws
The novel that scared a generation out of the ocean and inspired everything from Shark Week to Sharknado recently turned forty. Commemorations of Peter Benchley’s Jaws have been as rare as megalodon sightings, however. Ballantine has released a new paperback edition featuring an amusing list of the author’s potential titles (The Grinning Fish, Pisces Redux), and in February an LA fundraiser for Shark Savers/Wildaid performed excerpts promising “an evening of relentless terror (and really awkward sex).” Otherwise, silence.
The reason is obvious. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 adaptation is so totemic that the novel is considered glorified source material, despite selling twenty-million copies. Rare is the commentator who doesn’t harp on its faults, and rarer still the fan who defends it. Critics dismiss the book as “airport literature,” while genre lovers complain it lacks “virtually every single thing that makes the movie great.” Negative perceptions arguably begin with Spielberg himself. Amid the legendary production problems that plagued the making of the movie—pneumatic sharks that didn’t work, uncooperative ocean conditions that tripled the shooting schedule—the director managed to suggest that his biggest obstacle was Benchley’s original narrative: “If we don’t succeed in making this picture better than the book,” he said, “we’re in real trouble.”
It is good to see an argument made for the book, though Curnutt is frank that it is more an artifact of its era than the movie, which still feels timeless. But it had its power, at least for the then-10-year-old Curnutt.
Maybe it’s because my friends and I had great fun sneaking ketchup packets into the pool to reenact it, but Shaw’s blood-belching final close-up never haunted me as much as the novel’s Ahab-inspired image of Quint dragged to a watery grave snared in his own harpoon line. Hooper’s fate is even more macabre. As the ichthyologist is turned into a human toothpick Brody attempts an ill-conceived rescue by strafing the water with rifle fire. He manages to miss the shark completely yet land a bullet in Hooper’s neck. Long before reading Melville, I intuited that this was how a naturalistic universe mocked humanity.
By the way, author Benchley was the grandson of 30’s humorist Robert Benchley, noted wit (and an Oscar winner for one of his series of short films). And he was the son of Nathaniel Benchley, also a writer, whose book was the basis for another story set at the shore, the hilarious comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming
