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" If Jack Nicholson&amp;#039;s a rebel, Fidel Castro must be a baseball player. It&amp;#039;s become an Oscar-night ritual for the proceedings to include a moment of fawning over Hollywood&amp;#039;s most venerable bad boy. Nicholson&amp;#039;s iconic status as the establishment&amp;#039;s fave nonconformist should tell you how anxious the real thing makes bizzers, and how much happier they are when it&amp;#039;s just shtick; his trademark impudence upsets no industry applecarts, and Charlton Heston took more risks with his career. By now, after a quarter century of loaning out his swagger to safe projects whose inanity guarantees he&amp;#039;ll have pizzazz, Nicholson&amp;#039;s gloating roguishness just rots the screen. Yet he may have no choice but to soldier on as &amp;quot;Jack&amp;quot; into senility, since on the rare occasions when he pursues his former hobby, acting -- as in 1992&amp;#039;s Hoffa -- he can&amp;#039;t hold an audience&amp;#039;s interest.  Dumb and Dumber was better than The Truman Show. Judging from the fare the average critic joins the Academy in deeming praiseworthy, you&amp;#039;d never guess how many of the American movies audiences have cherished and found memorable since the late seventies have been cheesy, low-rent comedies -- from Animal House through Fast Times at Ridgemont High through There&amp;#039;s Something About Mary, all of which have inspired more genuine devotion than, say, Rain Man. Something that Hollywood has never learned is that prestige doesn&amp;#039;t equal art; art can be exciting. Not so the sluggish, vapid, &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; pictures bulging with the humanistic themes Gone with the Wind did without that get wheeled toward Best Picture nominations like medieval siege towers to be instantly forgotten, even if, like Gandhi or Out of Africa, they win. Although eager to honor the lettuce that comes with the cheese, the industry usually withholds its acclaim until the stars move up to classier projects. That&amp;#039;s why Jim Carrey, for instance, became a legit candidate for an Oscar nod with The Truman Show, and it&amp;#039;s not like his performance doesn&amp;#039;t deserve it. But even he may not know that Dumb and Dumber was smart and smarter.  Robert De Niro is a hack. Partly against his will, sure -- but blaming Hollywood&amp;#039;s dull idea that Bobby&amp;#039;s a tough guy for his devolution from next Brando into thinking-man&amp;#039;s Charles Bronson only gets you so far. De Niro&amp;#039;s own mystique, all balefully intellectualized heroism and a reserve that amounts to bombast, led him to this cul-de-sac. His deservedly fabled intensity has a fatal limitation, namely, its exclusion of any possibility that everyday life has its merits -- geniality (he prefers bravado), good times (he connects only with their potential violence or hysteria), sex, pleasure. While his unwillingness to accommodate the ordinary looks paradoxically adolescent in a performer in his fifties, it&amp;#039;s also grown stolid rather than electrifying. Even his fellow mastery salesman, Dustin Hoffman, has belatedly learned to enjoy himself on camera -- and Hoffman&amp;#039;s relish for silliness lifted Wag the Dog, while De Niro, deprived of Everests to climb, could indicate that he was in a comedy only by sporting facial hair and a wacky hat. Which he probably hoped gave the guy he played depth. Janeane Garofalo is sexier than Uma Thurman. Come on, admit it. How many times have you secretly thought the actress stuck playing the unattractive but smart-mouthed best friend was hotter than the female lead, or that the heroine&amp;#039;s mother had more going on than her onscreen daughter? In other words, recognized that sexiness is about brains and humor as much as it&amp;#039;s about youth or perfect looks, an elementary insight that still puts you one up on the average casting director. Michele Pfeiffer is one of the loveliest actresses ever to grace the screen, but Pfeiffer also can&amp;#039;t help projecting intelligence and a complex inner life -- and that&amp;#039;s why she&amp;#039;s never been as big as Julia Roberts, an actress whose charm is untarnished by any suspicion that she&amp;#039;ll ever learn to argue with you.  Clint Eastwood is a better director than Woody Allen. Not that Clint isn&amp;#039;t flailing, too, these days -- but at least the rut he&amp;#039;s stuck in is his own. After twenty-five-plus features, having already redone Fellini&amp;#039;s 8 1/2 as Stardust Memories and Amarcord as Radio Days, Allen could think of no better way to remind us he&amp;#039;s up there with the titans than xeroxing La Dolce Vita for Celebrity. Since Fellini was always a showman, even if that&amp;#039;s not what Woody&amp;#039;s aping him for, this stuff is generally less excruciating than the fake Bergmans Allen used to inflict on us. But at a stage when real masters have long since digested all influences, this autodidact is still charging us to grade his homework. Since Allen&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;integrity&amp;quot; consists in staying unappraised of any aspect of the culture other than his own situation, and he&amp;#039;s clearly better off avoiding too much insight into that, no wonder he&amp;#039;s grown more bullying. Yet there may be no more banal conception of profundity than deploring shallowness -- and there&amp;#039;s also good reason to mistrust a moralizer who keeps devising mousetraps to condemn everyone else&amp;#039;s pleasures while bemoaning the world&amp;#039;s hesitation about giving him everything he wants on a platter.  If Robin Williams is Everyman, why wasn&amp;#039;t I born a parakeet? Scott Fitzgerald on Joan Crawford, 1938: &amp;quot;You can never give her such a stage direction as &amp;#039;telling a lie,&amp;#039; because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British.&amp;quot; Ask Williams to muse on life&amp;#039;s ineffably poignant bliss, and the results are comparable. He doesn&amp;#039;t act; he leaks. If I need cheering up about the human condition, I&amp;#039;d rather watch Mike Myers, whose sweetness moves me because it&amp;#039;s neither grandiose nor maudlin -- the reason nothing human is alien to him is that he thinks it&amp;#039;s all hilarious, and wants us to share his delight. And if Everymen we must have, I&amp;#039;ll take Bill Murray over Williams any day. For two decades now, without a trace of self-pity, Murray&amp;#039;s skeptical gaze -- so weary of its own wariness, and vice versa -- has been conveying his placid suspicion that Everylife pretty much sucks and, as a result, that Everyskull&amp;#039;s contents tend to be truculent, grotty, and foul. But that&amp;#039;s just why his discoveries of new possibilities always have the beauty of genuine surprise, which goes by in an eye-blink before he starts making the best of each lucky little break. Brad Pitt isn&amp;#039;t sexy. I know remoteness is enticing, especially to female adolescents. But people who talk to their plants have better odds of eliciting a response than Pitt&amp;#039;s costars. He&amp;#039;s so exquisitely vapid, he could have bored Andy Warhol. Sometimes, the little girls get it right, and we all benefit -- Leo, for instance; Matt Damon. Other times, you know that by their freshman year in college, they&amp;#039;ll wonder what in hell they were thinking of. Indie movies think you&amp;#039;re boring. &amp;quot;Look at those assholes over there. Ordinary fucking people -- I hate &amp;#039;em.&amp;quot; When Harry Dean Stanton said that in Repo Man, it was a joke; in today&amp;#039;s indie movies, more often than not, it&amp;#039;s a given. The high-water mark remains the Coen brothers&amp;#039; supercilious Fargo, a movie that took its own condescension to bumpkin America too much for granted to even bother with supplying a rationale for it. Tackling unsavory, painful material that, for my money, should have either been treated with more depth or made much funnier, even the ostensibly groundbreaking Happiness peddled the same old banality of anomie. By contrast, because they&amp;#039;re not only affectionate but informed, indieland&amp;#039;s takes on scruffy subcultures (Swingers, Chasing Amy) are usually both more likable and more insightful. Except in parts of Safe, his weakest movie, Todd Haynes -- despite good reasons to find conventional society alienating -- doesn&amp;#039;t bother with this stuff, either; Velvet Goldmine is too busy celebrating glam liberation to waste time scoring off nonparticipants. And director Don Roos&amp;#039;s readiness to take an unsnide interest in anyone who ambled by -- Lyle Lovett&amp;#039;s cop and Lisa Kudrow&amp;#039;s spinster no less than Martin Donovan&amp;#039;s gay teacher or Christina Ricci&amp;#039;s trollop -- made The Opposite of Sex stand out more than, in a better world, it would have. Movies are for kids; TV&amp;#039;s for grown-ups. Every few months, another culture maven makes the discovery that TV is now &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; than the movies, which is as silly as the old consensus that the small screen was always the big one&amp;#039;s trashy also-ran. Yet there&amp;#039;s no question that a whole range of sensitive, modestly reflective entertainment that Hollywood used to have a lock on -- inspirational biopics and docudramas, explorations of relationships and sociological problems, even psychologically insightful comedies -- is more reliably purveyed on the tube than at the multiplex these days. One reason the home screen now outdoes the movies at delivering these middlebrow necessities of life is that television&amp;#039;s serial formats allow for more development and nuance. Another is that even hack TV shows are script-driven (and have to be, to keep the thing going week in and week out), while even upscale movies are deal-driven (and have to be, given the financial stakes and relatively short list of bankable talent). The proof&amp;#039;s in who calls the shots: Most TV producers got their start as writers. Most movie producers probably got their start trying to sell the wings that they&amp;#039;d just torn off flies.  Drew Barrymore is more important than Jodie Foster. Because she&amp;#039;s more vital to why people care about movies, that&amp;#039;s why -- even though Drew may never land a great part while, at thirty-six, Jodie&amp;#039;s so distinguished only Katharine Hepburn wouldn&amp;#039;t envy her CV. Accomplished, ambitious, brainy, tough -- okay, it&amp;#039;s asking for the moon to wish that Foster were interesting as well. But she&amp;#039;s got no imagination, her taste is both humorless and conventional enough to make her hard-won autonomy beside the point, and if she went to Yale, big deal -- Geena Davis is in Mensa. So maybe this self-possessed careerist didn&amp;#039;t want to be a cultural heroine and has good reason to mistrust excitement; it&amp;#039;s still been dispiriting to watch her fritter away her early-nineties clout on priggish tripe like the Oscar-greedy Nell and the vacuously worthy Contact. But her fellow ex--child star and tabloid vet won&amp;#039;t even need the respect that Foster prefers to eclat to wind up immortal, because Drew could spend the rest of her life popping up as the titty-flashing Gracie to David Letterman&amp;#039;s undeserving George Burns and still rank as one of the greatest actresses in screen history. You might have to go back to D.W. Griffith&amp;#039;s harem to find another face so vividly alive, responsiveness so candid but intuitively nuanced, behavior so spontaneous-looking but acute. While she&amp;#039;ll never have Foster&amp;#039;s technique, she doesn&amp;#039;t need it; just park a camera nearby, and small miracles of understanding (hers, ours) occur. Not only is she incapable of dishonesty onscreen, she knows that honesty is usually funny. Nor have all her vehicles been so trifling; I&amp;#039;m still waiting for someone to explain to me why The Wedding Singer is any less wonderful than Hepburn&amp;#039;s 1938 Holiday. And what do you know, Adam Sandler is pretty good in it, too -- which just proves that wonders never cease. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a1232/ten-say-movies-0499/>