April 2007 Archives

I should have listened to New York Times film critic Stephen Holden, who called "In the Land of Women" meek and mopey, "the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream." The film stars Meg Ryan in a relatively new role--down and out mom-figure rather than romantic lead--and Adam Brody (formerly of "The O.C.") as the all-purpose confidante for quite literally every woman in the film: ex-girlfriend, grandmother, and next door neighbors (Ryan as the mother and her daughter).

Despite the reviews, I figured--how bad could a movie be that stars Meg Ryan and Olympia Dukakis (who I love)? As it turns out, really bad. It's the worst movie I've seen in years. And I see a lot of movies.

Adam Brody--playing Carter Webb--is utterly unappealing in what I guess is the romantic lead--though there is nothing romantic about him or the part he plays. Nor is there anything comedic about Carter's character. Why so many beautiful, talented women are drawn to baring their souls to him is inexplicable. He doesn't do anything in the film aside from stumbling in and out of these women's lives. It's painfully clear is that Adam Brody can not carry a film. And since Brody is the epicenter of this "land of women," the movie falls on this fatal flaw.

Then there is the fact that though the movie is billed as a romantic comedy, it is an incredibly depressing film. The dominant themes are despair, death, cancer, and infidelity. I know--what fun on a warm spring afternoon!

I confess: I never watched "The O.C.," so perhaps I didn't enter the theater with the right sympathetic-to-Brody attitude like the rest of the "O.C." fans who made up the bulk of the audience around me. But even they shared my dismay. As the credits rolled and I got up to leave, one of the girls behind me quipped loudly and in appropriately high school melodramatic fashion: "That. Was the worst. Movie. Ever."

Yes, I silently agreed. Enough said. Brody gets a failing grade as confessor. I actually left the theater feeling angry. Save your money. There's nothing redeemable about this one.

Two of America's biggest born-again tabloid sensations are getting together in a stage musical with all the hoopla of a tent revival meeting. One is Kathie Lee Gifford, the public Christian and former morning talk-show matron whose repeated bouts with the unforgiving press finally drove her to resign her spot on "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee." The other is Aimee Semple McPherson, the Pentecostal preacher whose mix of theatricality, sex appeal and old-time Christianity blossomed in the 1920s into global fame at the helm of her own Los Angeles megachurch.

Gifford, who told The Washington Post that she's been fascinated with McPherson for 35 years, has written the book and lyrics to "Saving Aimee," a musical that premiered recently at the Signature Theater outside Washington to warm reviews.

Once a household name, "Sister Aimee" is enjoying a bit of a comeback lately, including a recent PBS special. And why not? We live in an age that understands her methods--she was among the first to use the media to expand her ministry and to extend her fame through scandal: McPherson was suspected of faking her own kidnapping to drive up her radio numbers (and possibly to cover up an affair with her engineer).

"She was the very first tabloid queen," says Gifford, who briefly inherited that crown after her husband, former New York Giants star and "Monday Night Football" personality Frank Gifford, was lured into a compromising position by a woman in the employ of a salacious newspaper.

Any Tolkien fan can tell you that J.R.R. Tolkien, a faithful Catholic, was pals with pop theologian C.S. Lewis, and that he laced his Lord of the Rings trilogy with Christian theology. What's not always obvious, however, is how. What's a hobbit got to do with the Messiah?

The "new" Tolkien book, "The Children of Hurin" provides few clues to the casual reader. One of Tolkien's "Lost Tales"—early, unpublished Middle Earth stories written before "The Hobbit"—the new book was edited from manuscripts by Tolkien's son Christopher. You can see the master of Middle Earth's style developing: it's Tolkien, only more so: the battle scenes thrum so mythically that they sound at times like a translation of "The Baghavad Gita." The good guys are impliably, humorlessly principled. The plot is downright Greek: Our hero, a man named Turin, makes every tragic mistake available to a mythic mortal, including a few Sophocles didn't think of. Then he dies.

After all, he's only human. "The Children of Hurin" confirms that Tolkien's great spiritual subject is incarnation. In this book, as in his famous trilogy, taking physical form is a grim weight that leaves us susceptible to the workings of evil. And if the battle between good and evil takes place in this physical realm, those fully incarnated beings called humans are the main battleground.

Round One of that battle, recounted in "The Children of Hurin," goes to evil, and neither salvation nor the cavalry is anywhere to be seen by the end. In his forward, Christopher suggests that Turin's story is based in part on his father's childhood at the end of the 19th century. If so, it's no wonder the adult Tolkien would become one of the most prodigious fantasists of the 20th. Any fabricated world would be better than the one that inspired the miseries endured by poor Turin.

A week or so ago, I suggested that "Idol Chatter" cover the Richard Gere kissing kerfuffle that was consuming India. It seems the "Officer and a Gentleman" exhibited what some Indians consider less than gentlemanly behavior by vigorously kissing Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty several times on the hand and cheek while attending an AIDS/HIV awareness event. At the time, it was decided there were other stories to cover and that the incident would most likely blow over quickly, but like Gere's career, this story has made an incredible comeback, with a court issuing arrest warrants for both Gere and Shilpa.

A local in Jaipur filed an obscenity complaint and Judge Dinesh Gupta issued the warrants stating that the actors, "transgressed all limits of vulgarity and have the tendency to corrupt the society" and called event footage "highly sexually erotic" and against India's strict public obscenity laws.

I agree strongly with Dinesh D'Souza when he says that while he doesn't share the "extreme conservatism of traditional cultures" he thinks it's "naive of us not to recognize that there are deeply-held values in other societies, and it is especially easy for Hollywood types like Gere to outrage the locals."

And while it's important to respect people's beliefs, Hinduism and tradition may not be the only motivations here: "Such cases against celebrities--often filed by publicity seekers--are common in conservative India," notes MSNBC.com. "They add to a backlog of legal cases that has nearly crippled the country's judicial system."

Gere himself mentioned on last night's Daily Show that, "They do this kind of thing quite often. I don't know that anyone has actually gone to jail ... It goes to a reputable court and they throw it out," as TMZ.com reports.

Coming just on the heels of the Elizabeth Hurley matrimony melee, it seems that these publicity seekers are moving to the big leagues, leaving Bollywood for Hollywood. But burning effigies of Gere in the streets? Imagine what would have happened if he'd had a "wardrobe malfunction"?

Sure, his Greenwich Village neighbors were aggravated with him a few years ago for building a Buddhist prayer hut on top of his brownstone, but Gere has done a lot of advocacy work in India, for health issues as well as Tibetan exiles. Heck, the man is buddy-buddy with the Dalai Lama himself, and often visits him in Dharamsala, in Northern India. It goes without saying that conservative traditionalists most likely wouldn't care if Gere has done good works, and might take offense at a "Western" interloper trying to improve/interfere with their culture.

And even though Shetty was raised in a traditional Hindu family, as her mother described in a January 2007 interview with The Times of London, she herself is quoted as saying, "this was not such a big thing, or obscene, for people to overreact in such a manner."

Then again, she has a warrant out for her arrest, too.

What do you think? Is this kiss hotter, so to speak, than his famous cinematic lip-lock with Debra Winger?

In case you haven't seen it yet, Beliefnet recently posted an interesting gallery on how its readers have credited the "law of attraction"--the idea that we create our reality with our thoughts, popularized by the controversial best-selling book and DVD, "The Secret"--as having worked miracles in their lives (ie: quitting smoking, getting money for college, and even obtaining a swing set!) Click here to check it out.

Here's some more "Secret" coverage you might be interested in:

Ten Steps to Unlocking "The Secret"

Salon Slams Oprah for Ugly "Secret"

Don't Be Fooled by "The Secret"

Don't Waste Time Unlocking "The Secret"

What Do You Think of "The Secret"?

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