Oscar (1991)

This is the story of "Snaps" Provolone (Sylvester Stallone) - a gangster who makes a promise to his father as he lies on his deathbed to go straight and bring honor back to the family name. Fast forward a month later and the majority of the movie is taking place on one very eventful morning.
This film was adapted from the play of the same name. You can tell right from the beginning by the way that director John Landis has decided to have his actors behave in exaggerated manners. And if there was any doubt, when Tim Curry comes on stage, er, screen, you know that it is an adaptation.
The comedy of this movie stops short of slapstick, which had it gone that route would have been funnier than what we had which was confusion of several black bags that keep being mistaken for each other, as well as the identity of a young woman who was pretending to be Provolone's daughter. Actually, as I think about it, this plot is rather reminiscent of something that Oscar Wilde might try to pull off, and I wonder if that's the joke - the play and this movie are both an homage to Oscar Wilde. Well, I'll go so far as to say that this movie was as entertaining as any of the productions of Wilde's plays that I've seen. Is that a qualified compliment? That is for you to figure out, and I'm guessing you know the answer to that.
I thought Stallone was going to be the weak link in this film, but he did a good job. Everyone did a good job. It's unfortunate that doing a good job meant being so annoying in the case of Marissa Tomei's portrayal of Lisa Provolone. The character was totally written to be annoying, so I can't really blame her for pulling it off.
What would have made this movie better is if it had Joe Piscopo in it...I know that there is some movie that came out around the same time with Piscopo as a mobster from the same era. It wasn't a very good movie, but perhaps the two together would work?

The Dukes of Hazzard (2005)

Just some good ol' boys, never meanin' no harm. Man, I don't know if I would go so far as to say that I loved this show as a kid, but I certainly watched often enough. I'm not old enough to have caught it when it originally aired, but I did see it in syndication. For a while it was on at either five or six pm every afternoon. What did I watch it for? Well, Catherine Bach as Daisy Duke didn't hurt matters, but I honestly wasn't that attracted to her. She seemed old and unhappy. I guess I would be too if I were the only woman on a set full of men, and I always had to look sexy while they were just fat and/or old and/or creepy. Was it the storylines? Wait, there were storylines? Plural? Every episode followed the same formula. 1: Duke boys have some fun. 2: Duke boys get hassled by the man 3: someone uncovers another plot by Boss Hogg 4: Uncle Jesse figures out a way for the boys to use the General Lee and Daisy to use her feminine wiles to thwart Boss Hogg and the police 5: big car chase with at least one amazing jump by the General Lee and at least one police car getting totalled.
Now, towards the end of the series they began to play fast and loose with just how many Duke boys there were, how many friendly deputies there were and just how much of a caricature of their own characters Hogg and Coltrane could be, but that as much proves the rule as anything.
Don't get me wrong - no one twisted my art to watch the show. This was the early and mid eighties, where I was watching the A-Team, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. All three shows were just as formulaic and ridiculous as the Dukes of Hazzard. I guess I can count these as guilty pleasures of my youth. Now, I can wish that I had spent that time reading or writing, but I didn't know any better then. I hope that I know better now. I probably don't.
Now, I watch CSI and NCIS and Criminal Minds. Um yeah. Oh wait! I watch a lot of BBC too, like Midsomer Murders...crap it's formulaic and predictable too. All these shows are. Damn it! Not only have I not leanred anything, I can't stop using exclamation points!
I probably shouldn't have watched this movie based upon the above. Just like I shouldn't have watched the A-Team movie, but I actually kind of liked that - it did have Liam Neeson. And this had Willie Nelson, which seemed like a good idea, but what the hell did they do to Uncle Jesse? Making moonshine and being a badassed war vet, I get that, but most of his lines were dumb jokes. I don't understand. Everybody else in the movie did an adequate job. This movie was as much a spoof of the series as it was an homage to it, and Jessica Simpson worked those Daisy Dukes in a way that Catherine Bach never did, not to mention that Hazzard county Georgia seems to be full of hillbilly guys and smokin' hot babes (to borrow from the movie).
I got exactly what I expected. That's obviously not surprising, but it's not necessarily bad, either.

White Dragon (2004)

This movie is a spoof of itself. A martial arts farce that plays at being a martial arts tour de force. Ultimately it is what many movies are - a love story with some laughs and some tears along the way.
Phoenix is a school girl concerned mostly with her looks who has a plan to meet Prince Tin-yang. Her plan works and she gains an invitation to come play her flute for him at the palace. But, before she can go, the infamous killer, Chicken Feathers murders the school principal and Phoenix's aged aunt reveals herself to be White Dragon and fights Chicken Feathers. She looses the battle and almost dies. Fearing that she will die and Chicken Feathers will never be caught, she passes her powers to Phoenix. And when she passes her power, it's just like a video game complete with sound effects and proper music, plus a life bar across the bottom of the screen to show Phoenix charging up.

The Whole Wide World (2003)

This could have been a brilliant bio-pic. Vincent D'Onofrio as the enigmatic Robert E. Howard and Renee Zellwegger as the school teacher Novalyne Price who befriends him, are well enough cast. But, I felt like I was watching a Hallmark movie of the week. That is not a good thing.
The first time Novalyne goes to Robert's house, there is a continuity snafu. From there it was all downhill. Novalyne goes into the house in early afternoon, stays for a few minutes before Robert offers to driver her around so they can talk. But, when they go back outside and its full dark. Also, in one scene Robert has five o'clock shadow and then the next the same evening, he is clean shaven.
D'Onofrio delivers most of his lines yelling or louder. That was a bit annoying. I have no idea about Howard's life story, but I hope he was more complex than portrayed in this movie.
Oddly, Zellwegger didn't get on my nerves so much, but only because D'Onofrio is annoying enough for both of them.
If you can avoid it, don't watch this movie.

The Thirteenth Tale

The Thirteenth Tale
by
Diane Setterfield

A young woman, Margaret Lea, the daughter of a bookshop owner, receives an interesting letter from a famous British writer, Vida Winter. The young woman is an amateur biographer, as she describes herself, "...a dilletante, a talented amateur". The writer is a famous recluse, but also recognized as Britain's greatest living author.
The two work out a deal for Lea to listen to Winter's tale and write it into a biography. The deal that Lea demands is that she be told the truth. Winter's deal is that she tell the story her way and not answer questions.
The story starts out with Winter recalling first her grandparent's life, then her parent's life as well as he rather wild and eccentric younger years with her twin sister. It is a story of mental illness as viewed by outsiders, and manipulation and sadism when viewed by insiders.
Lea takes a few days off to try and verify Winter's story. Lea travels first home and then to Winter's childhood home which had been badly burned and is waiting to be torn down so that a hotel could be built. Lea meets one fo the neighbors, whom she at first thinks is a ghost or another monster. He turns out to be an older man who runs his own catering business. The two strike up a new friendship over tea taken outside.
Eventually Winter reveals what she is going to of her story, but it is Lea's insights and discoveries that bring out the truth. Lea is able to unwind all of the mysteries before Winter succumbs to her illness. Based upon the discoveries she has made, Lea decides not to publish the biography she has written, but instead releases to the world the last story that Winter wrote - the so-called missing 13th tale, which Lea knows to be a version of Winter's own early childhood.
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What a splendid book. Or at least I think it is, I did not realize until the voice at the very end gave the credits that this was an abridged version. I try very hard to only listen to unabridged - and when I saw the entry for this item in the library's catalog, I assumed that the other library's would be as my own, where the thoughtful librarian only gets the unabridged audio versions. Alas, there may not be an unabridged version, but the story was still good, if not shorter.
Recently I have been reading a lot of fantasy and science fiction, and those are still my genres of choice. But, I have been feeling a bit boxed in - that this fantasy was too similar to that one, that this sci-fi was low on the sci and heavy on the melodrama. I decided to take a break from my genre pieces and so asked for recommendations. This book was the first of those, though I do have one fantasy book left to get through - book five of a five-part series (the last Percy Jackson book) - but I wanted to get started.
And what a start this book was. Writing a book about writer being interviewed by a biographer could have been all wonky or self-referential, but instead turned out to be a nice mystery to be solved by the biographer even as she saw the reflections of her own struggles and used what she saw as a catharsis to turn her life from one that she is not completely in control of into one which follows a path she is setting.
The nice thing about mysteries appearing in a non-genre piece is that they do not have to follow the genres rules. There were no cops, no private detectives, no one actively trying to solve a mystery, for only when the old woman reveals her story is there a mystery revealed. And the protagonist isn't trying to solve a mystery, even though she does, she is just trying to get as close as she can to the truth for her biography.
This book quite reminded me of "The Prestige" by Christopher Priest, not only by twins playing key roles, but by twins who had lost their sibling and felt their spirit. That seems quite an odd thing to be picked up by two novelists, both British, incidentally. Maybe there is some cultural phenomenon that I am not picking up on? Both books also have just a touch of the super-natural, but it's not in your face, it's the kind of thing that may be dismissed as the narrator's whimsey, and depending upon my mood will be taken either of the ways intended.