Books, Arts & Manners: Jangle Bells

AS ALWAYS at Christmas, cinema bestows baubles of every description on us until we feel like a helpless conifer groaning under mass-produced gaudiness. But let me begin with a couple of earlier movies that I didn’t get to before.

The Fisher King received generally warm notices, and is being touted as Oscar material. Let me say categorically that it is one of the most nonsensical, pretentious, mawkishly cloying movies I have ever had to retch through. An attempt by Richard La-Gravanese to write a modern New York Holy Grail story (in which the Grail turns out to be a school trophy won by an eccentric nabob), it brings on Jeff Bridges as a contemporary knight errant—not quite Lancelot and certainly no Galahad; also Robin Williams as a combination Percevalesque holy fool and wounded Amfortas-like fisher king. Under Terry Gilliam’s frenetic, Roger Rabbity direction, full of obnoxious artinesses, the film indulges Williams’s unholy foolishness.

JS

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John Simon

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AS ALWAYS at Christmas, cinema bestows baubles of every description on us until we feel like a helpless conifer groaning under mass-produced gaudiness. But let me begin with a couple of earlier movies that I didn’t get to before.

The Fisher King received generally warm notices, and is being touted as Oscar material. Let me say categorically that it is one of the most nonsensical, pretentious, mawkishly cloying movies I have ever had to retch through. An attempt by Richard La-Gravanese to write a modern New York Holy Grail story (in which the Grail turns out to be a school trophy won by an eccentric nabob), it brings on Jeff Bridges as a contemporary knight errant—not quite Lancelot and certainly no Galahad; also Robin Williams as a combination Percevalesque holy fool and wounded Amfortas-like fisher king. Under Terry Gilliam’s frenetic, Roger Rabbity direction, full of obnoxious artinesses, the film indulges Williams’s unholy foolishness.