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GOING to the movies is a competitive sport in this town. New Yorkers love to escape to their nearest cinema, offering as it does a momentary escape from the furious pace of daily life . . . your average Monday matinee can be packed to the gills. If a movie clicks with a New York audience, it can run for months, no mean feat considering that most movies these days are lucky to last a fortnight before hitting DVD what seems like five minutes later. Oscar season is looming, and you simply have to have an opinion on the quality merchandise unleashed by the Hollywood studios in another doomed effort to atone for a year of really crappy movies.
Here's your handy bluffers guide: the eagerlyanticipated movie of smashhit musical Rent landed dead on arrival, thanks to its anaemic take on '80s New York low-life, courtesy of Harry Potter director Chris Columbus, as did beautiful but empty middlebrow literary adaptation Memoirs Of A Geisha, directed by Rob Marshall.
Steven Spiel-berg's Munich, the man's highly provocative take on the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, has divided the Jewish community right down the middle; thankfully, the movie itself is a riveting throwback to the finest political thrillers of the '70s, and his best movie in yonks.
The reclusive Terrence Malick's take on the Pocahontas story, The New Wor ld , starring Colin Farrell (right), is either a crushing bore or a transcendental slice of cinematic genius . . . either way, it's very long, and Malick is rumoured to be recutting the movie before it goes on wide release.
Woody Allen's Londonset thriller Match Point, which hits Irish cinemas this weekend, has been heralded as a serious return to form; in reality it's his funniest movie in years, albeit unintentionally so, an absolute clunker, sunk by a non-performance from Ireland's own Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
One could go on, and onf Now you know what I actually do in New York . . . I go to the movies.
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YOU ARE HERE: 19 March 2007 / tribune.ie / 2006 / 01 / 08
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