UFO Info Week-End

Judging by Grady they entangle themselves in complex love lives and embark on whimsical road journeys

Judging by Grady, they entangle themselves in complex love lives and embark on whimsical road journeys. In a picaresque plot, spun out over a single weekend, Grady tends to his student James (Tobey Maguire), a mercurial, film-obsessed mythomaniac whose short stories map out “his own gloomy gulag”. The duo’s quest involves a dead dog and an ermine-trimmed jacket once worn by Marilyn Monroe. Screenwriter Steve Kloves (best known for directing The Fabulous Baker Boys) has jettisoned some of the clunkier baggage of Michael Chabon’s witty but rambling novel, but allows a number of the book’s loose ends to trail tantalisingly.The film sometimes leans too heavily on near-slapstick, but works best as a generous character opportunity for a personably neurotic cast. Robert Downey Jr may have only one trick these days, that manner of letting mischief flicker over his upper lip, but he does it with characteristic gusto as Grady’s trouble-seeking agent. Maguire is a lovely, perplexing mess as the confused wunderkind: you alternately warm to and want to slap this morbid, manipulative book-geek.Douglas is inspired casting. It would have been tidy and reassuring to hire Jeff Bridges and his amiable shambler act, but Douglas’s abrasive gravitas gives body to Grady’s doped-out stasis.

Even his voice-over, with its acid rasp, is justified simply by his intoning the words “rat’s ass”. And while we are used to seeing Douglas drape his creaky bones over young things, we can sense from the start that Grady won’t get off with Holmes’s cerebral ingénue, even if he does fetishise her red cowboy boots. The real sparks are with Grady’s academic lover – Frances McDormand, peerless at brittle irony with a sensual undertow.Director Hanson, who purveyed neon chic in his retro thriller LA Confidential, here switches to a daringly drab palette of brown, dead-leaf yellow and congealed-blood red – an autumnal look for autumnal characters. It suits a film about mid-life crisis, and as an example of that genre, Wonder Boys is far pithier than the glibly self-regarding American Beauty. As a study in suburban blues, it’s nearly as good as Ang Lee’s wintry, under-rated The Ice Storm.The wryly heartwarming coda may seem a cop-out, but then these characters have earned their cosy philosophical closure. Like a good comic novel, Wonder Boys imparts its hard-won moral conclusion – that old prodigies must make way for new, that fiction has a terrible way of spilling over into life, and that tormented young whiz-kids should probably get out more.

And, most importantly, that even hard-bitten latterday Hemingways must one day ditch that typewriter and invest in a laptop.. When Henry James wrote The Golden Bowl he was 61 years old and madly in love. His mood made for a story of temptation and jealousy, supposed innocence and gilded American cash. Although he once claimed its real subject was “pathetic simplicity and good faith,” you only have to read a few pages to see this is nonsense (thank God) Director James Ivory would disagree.

When Henry James wrote The Golden Bowl he was 61 years old and madly in love. His mood made for a story of temptation and jealousy, supposed innocence and gilded American cash. Although he once claimed its real subject was “pathetic simplicity and good faith,” you only have to read a few pages to see this is nonsense (thank God) Director James Ivory would disagree.
It is London, 1903. Elegant, educated American Charlotte (Uma Thurman) is crazy about an Italian prince (Jeremy Northam) Neither has any money. The prince has to renovate his palazzo, and so he marries Charlotte’s mind-bogglingly rich American friend Maggie (Kate Beckinsale) She’s good and kind and blah. Her father, a widower and art-collector called Verver (Nick Nolte), marries Charlotte. And so the four spend all their time (in august Merchant-Ivory locations) together.