Doze doll does wiz biz (1/10/01)
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Let The Devil Wear Black. [Stacy Title, 1999. Written by Jonathan Penner.]
Having apparently been dropped on my head that evening, I was well into this dark and noirish thriller about a blackclad doctoral candidate given to lengthy philosophical ruminations who lingers at the family mansion in LA after his father’s funeral, haunted by unsettling visions and the suspicion of foul play, disgusted by the alacrity with which his loathed uncle is taking over the old man’s business empire, holding oddly charged conversations with his disturbingly attractive mother [Jacqueline Bisset], trying to avoid his crazy poor-little-rich-girlfriend, and followed everywhere by a couple of ne’erdowell drinking buddies who seem as interchangeable as Tweedledum and Tweedledee — or, well, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — before I figured out what was going on, and began to develop a real appreciation of the ingenuity of the interpretation. — As it turns out there isn’t room in the scenario for Laertes, Polonius doesn’t get killed [though our hero does kick the shit out of him], Ophelia throws herself in front of a bus instead of drowning, and though the protagonist does pause in a graveyard on his way to the terminal shootout [in any version,
Hamlet ends as bloodily as a John Woo movie], it isn’t an entire skull that prompts his reflections on mortality. But, sheesh, not at all bad. And I thought I was watching it for the strippers.
____________The end of the world as we know it (1/6/01)
