Is there anything that the director Curtis Hanson can't do when it comes to the movies -- any genre, any story, any setup? In his newest film, In Her Shoes, the director of such tonally and thematically dissimilar films as 8 Mile and Wonder Boys wrests a richly textured story of love from a seemingly unlikely source, Jennifer Weiner's breezy best-selling fiction about two sisters -- played in the film by Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette -- engaged in an epic battle of the heart, a fight waged mostly against each other and their own best interests.
If Hanson's accomplishment seems surprising it's because the director, recently better known for testosterone-charged stories, has turned his attention to a book that belongs to that subgenre of fiction known as chick lit. Like Bridget Jones's Diary, In Her Shoes sails along on perfunctory prose and the kind of you-go-girl affirmations best summed up by the great Stuart Smalley: "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me." In contrast to Helen Fielding, the creator of Bridget Jones, however, Weiner does not regard the hapless heroines of In Her Shoes with contempt; each time her ostensible ugly duckling enters, she feels no need to remind us of the swishing sound of her thighs moving together in embarrassed consort.
That nominal ugly duckling here is Rose (Collette), the elder of the two Feller sisters. At once walking, talking caricatures and recognizably real, the sisters each have their own overdetermined, gender-specific cross to bear: Maggie, played by Diaz, is pretty, blond and slight as a whippet, the kind of woman who sashays around indoors in heels and not much else. Maggie is also unabashedly frisky (she sashays in front of a guy, and with the lights blazing), a sexual savant who happens to be learning disabled: she looks hot but can barely read. Mousy and blowsy Rose, meanwhile, wears plus-size everything and lives in spinsterish near-isolation, a slave to her Philadelphia law firm and graced with only one platonic friend (Brooke Smith) to call her own.
Susannah Grant's adaptation of Weiner's book stays true to its core, which involves a massive blowout between the sisters and the introduction of their long-estranged grandmother, Ella (Shirley MacLaine). Along the way, boyfriends come and go, including a couple of prospects for Rose (winningly played by Richard Burgi and especially Mark Feuerstein), and Maggie lands in Florida for a dangerously cute interlude amid a geriatric gaggle. It is no great surprise that Hanson, a sensitive director of actors who can corral bulls (think Russell Crowe in LA Confidential) and their retiring opposites (Kim Basinger in the same film), elicits exceptional performances from his leads, including MacLaine and Diaz, neither of whom is often called on to deliver a real performance and rarely volunteers the same.
Still, even with Hanson's abilities in full view from the get-go it takes a while to realize that there is more here than quips and designer sling-backs, largely because the story's schematic design proves such a distraction. Like the book, the film splits fairly evenly into separate stories that, as each character becomes self-actualized, eventually weave together. As a consequence, Hanson is forced to spend a lot of time toggling between Philadelphia -- where Rose nearly blooms, almost withers, only to bloom once more -- and Florida, where Maggie and Ella circle each other warily, trying to find common ground. More programmatic than organic, all this shuttling back and forth grows wearisome then irritating, especially because Rose's transformation turns out to be so much more complexly realized than Maggie's.
Like any good parent, Weiner tries to be fair to her creations, but her sympathies finally rest more with her truer underdog, Rose. Diaz's likability and star presence might have tipped the scales in Maggie's favor if Rose were played by a less accomplished actress. But Collette is so very good and goes so very deep inside her character -- bringing us right alongside her -- that she becomes the de facto center of the film as well as the bene-ficiary of our greatest emotional investment. You want Rose to lay down that ice cream container and poor-pitiful-me expression, to shuck her social conditioning and family dysfunction so she too can sashay in dangerous heels and kiss the boy (or two) in her life as a woman, not a contrivance.
Hanson gives Collette the space to do just that. The two sisters come out swinging, and it doesn't take long for Maggie to commit a transgression vile enough to send her packing to Florida. After Rose licks her wounds she begins to stake a claim on life, first by taking a leave of absence from work, then by saying yes to a lawyer, Simon (Feuerstein), to whom she always said no.
Hanson knows how to steam up a situation, and he directs a wonderful courtship scene between the two that begins with Simon reading aloud to Rose -- from one of those fat romance novels in which women wear bodices specifically designed to be torn from their invariably quivering bosoms -- and ends with the two in raptures.
The joy of this unassuming, generous film is that it never sells out its characters' desires or ours. Fat or thin, happy or sad, blond or brunet, we all want a happy ending, even if we don't necessarily want a boy or a pair of throw-me-down-and-ravage-me shoes. Well, maybe we all want the shoes.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and