Dear David,
Oh, dear, I guess this means I overstate when I describe my accomplishments in the kitchen as “able to boil water.” Actually, that’s something of an exaggeration as I tend to get bored waiting for the bubbles (that saying about the watched pot has a point) and drift off to check my email only to find hours later that I’ve ruined another pot. Was there a winning method? I hope it doesn’t involve pots.
You get to review Snake Eyes and Halloween Y2K or whatever it’s called (now there’s a horror movie idea). I get to review The Parent Trap. You must understand that Hayley Mills imprinted on me the way the mother goose imprints on the goslings. This means that I consider the original, the real Parent Trap as not only a key movie experience but a key life experience. Also, the Sheyer/Myers oeuvre has always struck me as essentially corrupt–glossy remakes with a superficial sitcom charm but no real understanding of or commitment to any kind of art or integrity. Their movies are as close to projecting a deal on the screen as you can get without a $20 million star and the future of the planet hanging in the balance.
Guess what, the film is a delight. Lindsay Lohan, in the Hayley Mills role(s), is as cute as a ladybug. Furthermore, she is completely believable despite the staggering challenge of playing two separate people, each of whom spends a lot of the movie pretending to be the other. That’s twice the task John Travolta and Nicolas Cage had in Face/Off plus she had to film the whole thing pretending that she was talking to someone who wasn’t there. She handles it with effortless and irresistible charm. Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson forget they’re not the stars of the movie and turn in real performances that are vulnerable, witty, and swooningly romantic. Dean Tavoularis does his usual magnificent job on production design. The camp and the homes in London and Napa Valley are both breathtakingly beautiful and completely right for their roles in the story.
All of this made it possible for me to almost ignore some gratingly indefensible aspects of the movie. There’s a scene in which one twin pierces the other’s ears in a manner so explicit and horrifying it might even feed one of your alligators (and don’t we mothers just love to have our darlings get ideas from that). And have I ever mentioned that I just hate hate hate hate it when movie directors and producers shamelessly short-cut to the audience’s Pavlovian emotional responses by throwing in baby boomer music? Parent Trap uses “Do You Believe in Magic?” and “Here Comes the Sun” and of course “Bad to the Bone” (the song used only slightly less often than “I Feel Good”). They even steal from the glorious score of “The Great Escape” and use the Linda Rondstadt version of “For Sentimental Reasons” that worked so beautifully in the uneven but underrated “Late for Dinner.” This kind of musical cross-pollination is a Sheyer/Myers trademark, and for me it underscores their essential cheesiness.
Hey, guess what, you may not have to read Ulysses after all. Today’s Washington Post reports that the Modern Library list is (surprise!) not totally scientific. Apparently, it was pretty informal. They just asked their luminaries to check off (not rank) which books from their list of 440 should be included. The judges weren’t even sure what the criteria were. When there were dozens of ties, the staff just assigned their own rankings. So it turns out that Ulysses may not be the greatest book of the century! It might even be Look Homeward, Angel, which wasn’t even on the list! (The list of nominees did not include anything by Thomas Wolfe, but did include 21 books by Random House’s Gore Vidal.) The current New Yorker has a Jack Ziegler cartoon showing a museum with a huge banner proclaiming, “This week only! The 100 Greatest Paintings of All Time!” In other words, people who don’t like the list should just get over it and make their own. Does the term “apples and oranges” mean anything to anyone? The whole thing reminds me of High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, a very funny book in which the main character and his two employees spend most of their time making lists of the all-time best Cheers episodes and other pop culture minutiae. Maybe I’ll put that on my list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century.
