Writer Paul Rudnick knows a good idea when he hears one. When Tom Hanks talked about his openly gay high school drama teacher after winning the Oscar for Philadelphia, Hanks had already warned the teacher about the prime-time speech. For Rudnick's comedy, golden-boy star Cameron Drake (Matt Dillon) announces at the Oscars (in a great lampoon of the ceremony) that his high school teacher was his ...
Decades before the Hollywood film industry became famous for megabudget disaster and science fiction spectaculars, the studios of Southern California (and particularly Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) were renowned for a uniquely American (and nearly extinct) kind of picture known as The Musical. Indeed, when Sight & Sound conducts its international critics poll in the second year of every decade, this ...