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This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: March 12 2006. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: February 26 2006.
This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: March 19 2006. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: March 5 2006.
Don DeLillo has written a movie about baseball, 'Game Six', which is strange for several reasons ...
Don DeLillo has written a movie about baseball, Game Six, which is strange for several reasons.
First, DeLillo is a novelist, not a screenwriter, and he's not a particularly accessible novelist at that. He's known for taut, bone-clean postmodern prose about helpless, well-meaning adults facing the fear and anxiety of modern life. He sometimes brings in real-life characters like Lee Harvey Oswald or Chairman Mao, and he sometimes tilts the story towards the surreal, a la Harold Pinter, just to keep us guessing. His stories always maintain a hard, cold surface, never fully allowing the reader inside, and rarely delivering climactic moments. How this was going to translate into a baseball flick seemed not at all clear.
Game Six stars Michael Keaton as a nervous but brash playwright who loves the Boston Red Sox. He's feeling a bit nervous because his new play is opening on Broadway the same night the Red Sox face the New York Mets in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Keaton's character seems to enjoy life, though he's struggling to juggle a vivacious girlfriend (Bebe Neuwirth), a moody teenage daughter and a bitter soon-to-be ex-wife. He takes solace in his hopes for a Red Sox World Series victory (not knowing, of course, that the Red Sox are about to lose badly in one of the most suspenseful baseball games of all time) and he frets over the possibility that a hip new drama critic played by Robert Downey Jr. will savage his new play.
This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: March 26 2006. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: March 12 2006.
This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: April 2 2006. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: March 19 2006.
This article is part of the Jamelah Reads The Classics series. The next post in the series is Jamelah Reads the Classics: The Book of Margery Kempe. The previous post in the series is Jamelah Reads the Classics: Heart of Darkness.
