Books, Arts & Manners: A Star is Born

LET’S SPEAK about an exceptionally charming young actress, Sandra Bullock. It is my wife who, during a brief stint as a theatrical casting director, gave Miss Bullock her stage breakthrough, having picked her picture from among those of many other applicants. It was a terrible play, but I was able to give Sandra Bullock what I think was her first major rave. When she moved on to the movies, I was disappointed in her first appearance—in a dreadful American remake of the great Dutch thriller The Vanishing. But after that, everything she did was solid: you must, at the very least, have seen her driving that bus in Speed. In While You Were Sleeping she has an even tougher assignment: to carry the entire movie. And she does.

While You Were Sleeping is a mediocre concoction—indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, quite preposterous. The first film written by Daniel G. Sullivan and Fredric Lebow, it was directed by John Turteltaub, whose Cool Runnings I either missed or have totally forgotten. It concerns Lucy, an orphan working as a token clerk in a booth on the Chicago El. This is already absurd. In all my many years of riding subways—not, to be sure, in Chicago, but so what? — I have never seen a token booth inhabited by anyone remotely like Miss Bullock. I realize that romantic screwball comedies embellish things, but a young woman with half the charm, looks, and savoir faire of this Lucy ought to be running for President.

JS

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John Simon

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LET’S SPEAK about an exceptionally charming young actress, Sandra Bullock. It is my wife who, during a brief stint as a theatrical casting director, gave Miss Bullock her stage breakthrough, having picked her picture from among those of many other applicants. It was a terrible play, but I was able to give Sandra Bullock what I think was her first major rave. When she moved on to the movies, I was disappointed in her first appearance—in a dreadful American remake of the great Dutch thriller The Vanishing. But after that, everything she did was solid: you must, at the very least, have seen her driving that bus in Speed. In While You Were Sleeping she has an even tougher assignment: to carry the entire movie. And she does.

While You Were Sleeping is a mediocre concoction—indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, quite preposterous. The first film written by Daniel G. Sullivan and Fredric Lebow, it was directed by John Turteltaub, whose Cool Runnings I either missed or have totally forgotten. It concerns Lucy, an orphan working as a token clerk in a booth on the Chicago El. This is already absurd. In all my many years of riding subways—not, to be sure, in Chicago, but so what? — I have never seen a token booth inhabited by anyone remotely like Miss Bullock. I realize that romantic screwball comedies embellish things, but a young woman with half the charm, looks, and savoir faire of this Lucy ought to be running for President.