Can You Ever Forgive Me? is for everybody out there who feels like a complete fraud. The movie is based on writer and literary forger Lee Israel’s confessional memoir. When her career as an author of celebrity biographies stalled due to lack of critical or commercial success, Israel got desperate. She spent a year in the early 1990s forging letters by dead celebrities like Noël Coward and Dorothy Parker and selling them to autograph brokers for hundreds of dollars each. The film is ostensibly about Israel successfully flimflamming the entire literary document community before the FBI caught onto her. But it’s also an examination of her sense of identity being stripped away when what she’s built it on – her work as a writer – is destroyed because both her colleagues and the public tell her she’s no good at it.
If you couldn’t tell from the opening sentence of this review, I count myself as one of those people who feels like a fraud.
Read more…
It’s times like these that I wonder if Roger Ebert ever faced the problem I’m having. Does that make it sound like I’m putting myself in the same ballpark as Roger Ebert? I’m not. I am to Roger Ebert what Caddyshack II is to Caddyshack. (As per review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the sequel currently stands at 4%(!) positive compared to the original’s 75% rating. So, yeah, that seems fair.) If anything, the higher rating isn’t high enough to properly gauge the late, great film critic’s skills. Still, did he ever review a remake of a movie he so beloved, and felt so close to, that he wasn’t sure if he could fairly assess the remake on its own merits? That was my worry going into the 2016 version of Ghostbusters.
If pop culture-obsessed children of the 1980s made a top ten list of movies that should be treated most like Lennie’s beloved rabbits in Of Mice and Men, the original Ghostbusters would be a heavy contender for number one. I turned five the summer it was released, and if you weren’t there, it’s impossible to overstate the absolute phenomenon that the movie was. A photo exists of my entire family wearing white shirts with the Ghostbusters logo emblazoned on the front, each of our names ironed onto the pocket. I vividly remember Ghostbusters being the very first VHS rental for my family’s freshly purchased VCR.
There’s a lot of history here is all I’m saying.
Read more...
