I'll be updating the Rock Journalist blog with more of my essays soon. Steve Cataldo of the Nervous Eaters scheduled for Visual Radio...
Last night I was watching Random Hearts again...would have loved to have interviewed the late Sydney Pollack a wonderful actor who showed up in movies he directed - Tootsie and Random Hearts being two of them. The Firm works well despite Tom Cruise's inability to act and the strange ending which deviated from the John Grisham book.
But while watching Random Hearts (which the TV listing had as 1 AM - 5 AM) the clock jumped from 2 AM to 3 AM with Daylight Saving Time forcing its way into our consciousness. Anyway, Pollack is unobtrusive but always great...and his directing is sublime...Random Hearts, The Firm and Tootsie always calling me back. Perhaps he had Cruise in The Firm to show what a great flick he could make with a bad actor...it's really too bad that Tommy can't get a grip the way the Keanu Reeves became a better actor before our eyes. Cruise works best in Risky Business where he was out of sync with the world and the transvestite hooker and Rebecca de Mornay got the better of him...his cluelessness worked in that regard...but in The Firm a Tobey Maguire-type would have been more appropriate. Also, what young man with a beautiful wife and everything going for him is going to sleep with some hooker on a beach without waiting for the 7 year itch! But outside of that, the film worked, as does Random Hearts, which got a weird 1 star on the TV rating but is actually much better than Harrison Ford's other waterlogged film, What Lies Beneath. The characters from Random Hearts would lend themselves to a sequel where they move on and help a new protagonist...Hollywood needs to bring back characters that make sense...and that's a story for another day 4:53 PM Sunday
