Films featuring
Kevin Kline

Looking for Richard

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Not long before this movie came out, I spent a couple of weeks in London and, among other things, took in a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at Bankside. And unlike my wimpy travelling companions, who splurged for box seats, I experienced the play in true groundling fashion, huddled against the stage in a rain storm. Okay, I don’t think the groundlings of Shakespeare’s day covered themselves in plastic bags, but they would have if they’d had them.

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De-Lovely

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The good news is that, even if De-Lovely’s narrative were completely missing in action, it would still be worth a viewing for its first-class productions of Cole Porter’s music, featuring performances by several contemporary artists like Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Diana Krall, Elvis Costello, and Natalie Cole. The even better news is that the story of De-Lovely, tracking the last fifty years of Cole Porter’s life, is also worth your attention.

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Silverado

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Lawrence Kasdan‘s Silverado is a modern old-fashioned western. It’s old-fashioned in the way that it pretends that the western never fell out of favor as a genre. Embued with the optimism that westerns lost in the late 1960s and 1970s, it freely embraces the time-honored conventions that Blazing Saddles gleefully lampooned a decade earlier. It’s modern in its first-rate production values and its cast of stars-in-the-making.

Filmed mostly in New Mexico, Silverado makes the maximum use of the wide open spaces available. Towns sit in the middle of vast plains that stretch to distant mountains. The cinematography is almost a character unto itself.

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