JANUARY
27, 2004 --
Brief
comments on two current movies that have titles beginning with
the letter "M" --
Scott Wilson
meets up with"Monster" star Charlize Theron. Is this
a link-up with" In Cold Blood," the movie based on Truman
Capote's non-fiction novel, in
which Wilson and Robert Blake played the bad guys. Bruce Dern is
also in "Monster." Some 30 years ago he
had a bigger role in "The Great Gatsby," (Tom Buchanan),
the movie that had Scott Wilson playing the killer of Robert Redford
(Gatsby)."
It is not clear
if the "F" word was spoken a record number of times in "Monster." Sure
seemed like the movie broke this record. (And how can Charlize Theron
not get best actress at the Academy Awards?
"Mystic
River ends with the vigilante apparently getting away with murder.
Here, the Clint Eastwood departs from "The Ox-Bow Incident," where
the
vigilante leader kills himself on learning that he hanged three innocent men.
It is probably reading too much into Hollywood to note that the"Mystic
River"
vigilante (Sean Penn) also killed, offscreen, the man who ratted on him for
an earlier crime. That is to say, Penn, in this movie, killed someone who named
named, a very serious offense in some Hollywood circles, and, in "Mystic
River," clearly a capital offense.
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In this
movie, Sean Penn plays a variation on the Johnny Friendly
gangster/union boss(played by Lee J. Cobb) in "On the
Waterfront," Elia Kazan's defense of naming names. And "Mystic
River" is, itself, a kind of variation on a theme of "The
Ox-Bow Indcident" meets "On the Waterfront."
There is,
of course, rough justice in the killing of Tim Robbins by
Penn. And nice job Kevin Bacon. How soon a vehicle with Theron
and Bacon?
Kazan got
his start in theater--the Group Theater, whose first hit
was Sidney Kingsley's 1933 play, "Men in White." In
Act I, scene 4, Dr. Ferguson says to Dr.
Levine,"Before we let the State control medicine, we'd have to put every
politician on the operating table,and cut out his acquisitive instincts." Dr.
Levine laughs and replies,"That, I'm afraid, would be a major operation." How
neat it would be to have this comment presented to the Democratic presidential
field as a test of their "acquisitive instincts."
Wisdom
of the Federalist Papers, From No. 48, attributed to Madison:
"It
will not be denied that power is of an
encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing
the limits assigned to it." (This was written about one hundred years
before Lord
Acton warned that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.) |
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