Words

Word of the day : nascent
                                          : coming or having recently come into existence

Great weekend of games.  My predictions so far: Correct - 35 , Incorrect - 17

Croods, not surprisingly, ruled the box office this weekend.  No idea what it's about, but it is a kids' movie, so you knew it would do well.  Olympus Has Fallen, a crummy-looking, White House-gets-invaded thriller, showed strongly in second, with over $30 mil.  Oz and The Call stayed steady at #3 and #4, respectively.  The Tina Fey-Paul Rudd comedy-drama Admission landed with a thud at #5, earning just over $6 million.  Spring Breakers is performing well in limited theaters, but audience scores are very low; people are curious about the movie but not liking it. 

*

The Words (2012), the debut film from the writing-directing team of Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, is a fine literary mystery, a matryoshka doll of a tale - a story within a story within a story.  Bradley Cooper is the writer who can't catch a break.  In Paris on his honeymoon with wife Zoe Saldana, he finds an old writers' satchel with a novel inside of it.  Desperate for anything, he re-types the story line-for-line and submits to an agent.  Lo and behold, the book becomes a huge hit.  Along comes a raggedy, scuffling old man (Jeremy Irons, in old-age makeup) who accuses Cooper of stealing his book, which was lost on a train long ago. 

But Cooper's character is a fictional creation, you see, a character in the book written by a louche writer (Dennis Quaid).  Did what happened to Cooper happen to Quaid's character?  Did Quaid steal a story along the way?  Is that what an avid fan (Olivia Wilde, proving that you can never have too many good-looking people in one movie) is eager to find out about him? 

The ending is a bit of a letdown; I think the movie needed another five minutes to answer some of the questions it raised, but I was absorbed by all the storylines.  It's a good-looking, well-acted film. 

*

A selection today for list of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time:


Jeremy Irons
as Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune (1990)

Speaking of Irons, be sure to catch his Oscar-winning turn as the real-life Long Island socialite murderer sometime during your life.  As the spruce, timorous, eloquently shifty von Bulow, Irons uses his magnificent voice and Eurotrash mien to grand use in the controversial role of the man who fiddled with his wife's (Glenn Close) medications to make her overdose and spend the rest of her life brain-dead.  It's a wonderful part, requiring Irons to be sneaky and unreadable, silky and entertaining, with a cold heart of steel. 




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