Which brings me to Nicholas Nickleby (Jan. 3). I won't act like I'm jonesing to catch it just 'cause some dead British guy wrote it. Dickens? Love him. Great English thespians like Miranda Richardson and Jim Broadbent? Fantastic. And I'm very happy that director Douglas McGrath, the man who put a little bounce into Emma, is in charge. Ain't why I'm going, though, Einstein. I'll be lining up for a little Charlie Hunnam sumthin'-sumthin'.
Hunnam plays Nicholas. He's also blond, 22 years old, and was buck naked and being mounted by an older man within the first 15 minutes of the British Queer as Folk. (I love actors—so brave.) Hunnam played predatory pretty-boy Lloyd on the tragically underrated Fox sitcom Undeclared. And he was Katie Holmes' mysterious ex-boyfriend in Abandon, a crap-ass thriller I would've seen if it had stayed open for more than two seconds. (DVD, please?) Hunnam is pouty and perfect and potentially a very, very bad boy; he looks like what every fading member of 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys wishes he could be.
David James
Gere and his client Zellweger.
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Bah, humbug, I say, if the movie stays too true to Dickens. I'm hoping McGrath found an opportunity in Nicholas' adventures for Hunnam to work up a sweat.
Steve Wiecking
Bella Benigni
Poor Roberto Benigni: When he's funny, they call him superficial; when he's serious, they call him pretentious. He's getting it from both directions for Pinocchio, Italy's biggest film hit ever (Dec. 25). And not just the usual sniping this time—he's being accused of being too faithful to Carlo Collodi's classic and not faithful enough; for being too old to play the lead (it's a puppet, for chrissakes!); for hiring his wife to play the Blue Fairy; for directing her badly; for accepting tainted money (from the Italian prime minister, whom Italians elected, for chrissakes!) to finish the film when his backer went bankrupt. And that's before stateside reviewers get their licks in. . . .
Me, I can't wait for Benigni's latest to open; he was born to play the role of Pinocchio the way Collodi wrote it: an agent of chaos who hurts everyone around him (himself most of all), vain, amoral, impulsive, heartless yet sentimental to a fault. A whole lot like your typical Italian man, in fact, which is just what Collodi meant him to be.
Remember: The 1940 Disney animated Pinocchio was a mess, leaping from incident to incident without warning, interrupted by droopy bits and (admittedly faux) moralizing. That version, with its radically simplified story and trudging pace, is as far from the spirit of the book as you could get. Pinocchio is anarchic as Carnival, and the less Benigni and co. have tried to tame for their film version, the better.
Roger Downey
My Spanish Heart
What really grabs me about Talk to Her (Dec. 25) is a film still of a female bullfighter (Rosario Flores) alone in the ring. With that single shot, Pedro Almod� reveals the essence of his New Spanish Woman, looking for new ways to live, or simply survive, on her own. After the success of his Oscar-winning All About My Mother, Almod� could have pulled a Verhoeven, leaving his native land to become just another Hollywood drone. (And I'm sure there were big-money offers.) Instead, sticking to Spain, his new film looks to be meditative and unapologetically complex, worlds away from the breezy, kinky high jinks of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and the next promising step in an unlikely trajectory from well-written sex farces to beautifully calibrated, wittily referential art films.
Neal Schindler
