Wonder Boys is Curtis Hanson's delicate and playful film adaptation of the novel by Michael Chabon.  All the elements are in place for a Sherlock Holmes mystery or maybe a game of Clue.  Novelist and professor Grady Tripp has a curious case of writer's block.  Tripp is portrayed by the lively Michael Douglas in his best performance.  Robert Downey, Jr. is splendid as Tripp's editor, Crabtree.  Katie Holmes "acts with fire" (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone). 

     Frances McDormand achieves something special with her portrayal of the university chancellor who is torn between her lukewarm marriage to an academic and her passionate affair with the troubled Professor Tripp.  Rip Torn is exquisite as a much successful and productive author named Q.  Tobey Maguire "must come to be known as the perfect twenty-something actor" (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times).  Maguire plays the prodigal son James Leer, who makes everything up as he goes along.  Sprinkling white lies all over the place like confetti, James definitely needs an editor.

     "That is a big trunk.  It holds a tuba, a suitcase, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly."  --  James Leer

     "That's just what they used to say in the ads."  --  Professor Grady Tripp

     "When the family pet has been assassinated, the owner does not want to hear that one of her students was the triggerman."  --  Professor Tripp

     "Does she want to hear it was one of her professors?"  --  Leer

     "I've got tenure."  --  Tripp

     Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is quite a delirious thrill ride.  The late River Phoenix and the great Sean Connery make the time pass pleasantly.  We know we are in the presence of greatness when they're on the screen.  The dependable Harrison Ford as our hero "Indy" chases goons from across the globe in boat chases, car chases, you name it.

     The Holy Grail offers eternal life and good health forever to those who drink from it.  To drink from the wrong golden bowl is to suffer a most awful death. 

     The bad guy drinks from the wrong cup and grows old before our very eyes.  His hair grows out long and gangly.  Then he falls and shatters to dust.  Not before grabbing onto Indy's girl, who is much like the Bond girl in James Bond pictures.

     "He chose...  poorly..." the Grail Knight says.

     Unfortunately (spoiler warning), Indy's girl falls into a bottomless pit.  I, for one, have been haunted by that vision ever since I saw this film as a young boy.

     Now I'm a young man and I respect the Holy Grail as a MacGuffin that represents a time when health was bountiful and things like smoke and ash didn't exist.

     Boogie Nights has a masterful denouement (pronounced Day-no-maw) toward the end where all the characters are dispatched to their final destinies.  This deus-ex-machina with bells tolling is tour-de-force storytelling from Paul Thomas Anderson. 

     Anderson "has surpassed himself with Magnolia" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).  That is an observation I agree with.  The story about intertwining lives, in various disarray, is a bombastic masterpiece.  "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us," quiz kid Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) says in the film.  The tagline of the picture was "When it rains, it pours."

Tags: Film Review