BY BEN WINTERS
Believe it or not, the Lord Almighty has personally endorsed the 1996
Eddie Murphy-starring remake of The Nutty Professor.
In an interview in the Christian monthly CCMMagazine—out in time
for the late-May release of his latest big screen farce, Bruce Almighty—director
Tom Shadyac recalls that the time of the Professor release was, for him,
one of great spiritual crisis which was solved by a chat with God.
“I had just finished The Nutty Professor and was jumping into another
movie, and I didn’t think I could do it. I went off to the desert,
to this place of quiet, and was met there by what I would call an inexplicable
spiritual event,” Shadyac tells the Christian monthly, which then
quotes the director explaining that God said to him, “Go on, young
man. You’re doing the right thing. I’m with you.”
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Bruce
Almighty has a lot more depth than just your
run-of-the-mill Jim Carrey toilet humor, according to Christian-based mags. |
Shadyac has clearly
been doing something right—Bruce Almighty, featuring Jim Carrey as
a loveable doofus granted superpowers by God (played by austere, non-doofusy
Morgan Freeman), flew out of the box office, beating out Matrix 2 in its
opening weekend. Matrix—that high tech/techno/kung fu/leather fetish
blockbuster—of course is sold as being, at its roots, a work of deep
philosophy. Interestingly, Bruce Almighty is being touted in some corners
as a similarly thoughtful and contemplative work—despite the trailer,
in which a dog urinates, standing up, into a toilet bowl.
In a feature in the San Bernardino County Sun, for example, writer Glenn
Whipp says, “Bruce has more on its mind than potty humor. Shadyac’s
movie is a rather straightforward account of a man’s journey to God,
and it’s full of prayer, miracles (big and small) and discussions
about free will vs. predestination.”
You just never know in this business—if there’s one thing we
thought we knew about summer movie audiences, it’s that they’re
not overly interested in issues of free will versus predestination.
For those of us not used to reading the movie reviews from religious periodicals,
it’s fascinating to see how reviewers with faith-based points of
view take on a movie that is crass and irreverent, in the way of contemporary
Hollywood comedies, while still touting a loving view of God. Anna Waterhouse,
writing in Christianity Today, is won over by the movie’s message:
“Make no mistake,” she writes. “Bruce Almighty is Judeo-Christian
to its bones.”
Still, she says, “strictly speaking, [the film] wasn’t written
for Christians, since anyone with a genuine relationship with God would
already know the material. But who says that being reminded can’t
be fun?”
If there is a God, someone should ask her or him why—after Matrix
2 and Bruce Almighty—the most-watched movie of the summer thus far
is Daddy Day Care.
CONTROVERSIAL VANESSA
Kudos to Newsday columnist Linda Winer. She’s the only theatre journalist
in New York who took the time to note, as Vanessa Redgrave’s role
in Long Day’s Journey has piled up the plaudits—including a
Tony nomination—“how close Americans came to losing this transcendent
artist altogether.”
Why? Because Redgrave’s clamorous political opinions have intruded
on her professional life over the last several decades, and, as Winer
recounted in her May 11 column, “some cultural producers took it
upon themselves to decide that [Redgrave’s] outspoken support of
the Palestine Liberation Organization made her unsuited for employment
in this country.” Actually, “outspoken support” is kind
of an understatement; when pro-Israeli protestors picketed the Academy
Awards in ’78, Redgrave called them “Zionist hoodlums”
from the podium.
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Strong
political viewpoints didn't keep
Vanessa Redgrave, pictured above with Brian Dennehy, from getting a Tony nod for Long Day's Journey Into Night. |
Winer recounts Redgrave’s
subsequent blackballing, first from the Boston Symphony, which “fired
her as narrator of Stravinsky’s 'Oedipus Rex’ in 1984 because
of her ideas,” and then by “The League of American Theaters
and Producers, [which] canceled her contract for the American tour of
Lettice and Lovage in 1991, and an arbitrator said the producers were
within their rights to do so.”
Recalling Redgrave’s clashes isn’t the point of Winer’s
column, though. It’s to remind us of censorship going on right now—such
as PBS’s decision not to air a screen adaptation of The Death of
Klinghoffer. That John Adams opera, from 1991, deals with the hijacking
of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and the murder of American passenger
Leon Klinghoffer.
PBS was going to air it, and they’ve changed their minds. Which is
a shame; according to a review from the Guardian in England (where Klinghoffer
has already aired on the BBC), the piece is “as real as opera is
going to get on television. And the music is accessible and dramatic.”
But groups like the Anti-Defamation League, “which considers Adams’
opera an unbalanced view of the tragedy,” have argued against its
being accepted for broadcast on PBS. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
“'It’s not balanced—not at all,’ Ken Jacobson,
the ADL’s associate national director, says of Adams’ opera.
'Everything we’ve heard about the film suggests…that Palestinians
seem somehow like decent guys and good people, and Jews are cast in a
negative light.’
Nothing like people arguing for the suppression of a work of art based
on what they’ve “heard about” it.
KID STUFF
In a theatrical season when A Year With Frog and Toad is competing for
the Best Musical Tony Award, Joyce McMillan, theatre writer for The Scotsman,
offers some rules for creating good theatre for the tots. (The occasion
is the International Festival of Children’s Theatre, just opened
in Edinburgh).
“Decide what story you’re telling and then get on with it,”
she writes. “Adults may enjoy the odd interesting digression, children
simply lose interest and start eating crisps.”
If anyone is doing it right, it must be the Minneapolis Children’s
Theatre, which has been awarded a special Tony award for excellence in
regional theatre. In a long feature for the Chicago Tribune on May 18,
Chris Jones tried to figure out why the Windy City doesn’t have an
institution like MCT; the clearest answer he gets is from MCT’s artistic
director, Peter Brosius: “You cannot just create a place like the
Children’s Theatre overnight.”
It takes a lot of time and a lot of money, and Chicago’s time and
money has been spent elsewhere. As Jones puts it, “while Chicago
was focusing on the edgy likes of David Mamet or John Malkovich, in Minneapolis
the attention of the artists was put on children.”