Here's a limey's take on I am Sam. I know it's been out for months but we, less Mick, know how quick the British are.
Sean Penn is one of my favorite actors, but this article makes a very good point.
The true meaning of 'offensive'
By Nigel Andrews
Published: May 8 2002
Some movie roles should be stamped "O.N.G.": Oscar Nomination Guaranteed. Mentally or physically disabled characters have long been a shoo-in for Academy shortlists. In I Am Sam Sean Penn plays a waiter at a well-known chain coffee shop - begins with "S" - who has a mental age of seven. Although this is at least one year above that of many folk active in Los Angeles, he is thought unsuited to raising a little daughter (Dakota Fanning) whose mother has gone awol. So lawyer Michelle Pfeiffer, a harried yuppie and equally dysfunctional parent (we are nudged to observe in scenes of hurried breakfasts and missed mother-son trysts), fights for him pro bono.
If she loses, little Dakota will be farmed out to wannabe foster mom Laura Dern. If she fails the possibility arises of I Am Sam 2, a nightmare too dreadful to contemplate. More custody battles; more flute and piano music applied like basting on a turkey; more of Mr Penn risking plagiarism actions by mimicking Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, down to the chanting delivery, the hand gestures that seem to be kneading invisible clay, and the thriftshop clothes: cut-off nylon jacket, trousers stopping above the ankles.
The film's topic is so worthy that one hardly dares to be rude. Registered liberals will set upon me as after Oscar night itself, when shortlisted Penn lost out to the great Afro-American revolution, with only A Beautiful Mind winning for that all-important Hollywood genre, whitefolk in mental crisis. Meanwhile I am staring at an e-mail from a disability charity ordering me not to use the term "retard" in my review, the film's term for its hero, since it is offensive.
Here is what is offensive. Movies that use afflictions of the mind as a climbing frame for actors who feel they won't have Done It All - or won it all - until playing someone crippled in brain or body. Movies that strew product placement through scenes (not just S***bucks but P*zza H*t and S*ven-El*ven) hoping we will notice only subliminally, thereby allowing them to take the county and skip the brickbats. Movies that use emotions - weeping, laughing, loving the shining faces of little tots - as a means of decimating the spectator's own mental age and corralling him into intellectual surrender. And movies that pretend, with a cruelly stupid sentimental optimism, that the mental seven-year-old is more self-sufficient than the flustered career woman. Does the PC brigade really believe that the simple matter-of-fact word "retard" is more affronting than a film that simplifies the condition itself to make a would-be heartwarming fable about holy fools versus heathen go-getters?
I am Sam review from FT
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Here's a limey's take on I am Sam. I know it's been out for months but we, less Mick, know how quick the British are.
Sean Penn is one of my favorite actors, but this article makes a very good point.
The true meaning of 'offensive'
By Nigel Andrews
Published: May 8 2002
Some movie roles should be stamped "O.N.G.": Oscar Nomination Guaranteed. Mentally or physically disabled characters have long been a shoo-in for Academy shortlists. In I Am Sam Sean Penn plays a waiter at a well-known chain coffee shop - begins with "S" - who has a mental age of seven. Although this is at least one year above that of many folk active in Los Angeles, he is thought unsuited to raising a little daughter (Dakota Fanning) whose mother has gone awol. So lawyer Michelle Pfeiffer, a harried yuppie and equally dysfunctional parent (we are nudged to observe in scenes of hurried breakfasts and missed mother-son trysts), fights for him pro bono.
If she loses, little Dakota will be farmed out to wannabe foster mom Laura Dern. If she fails the possibility arises of I Am Sam 2, a nightmare too dreadful to contemplate. More custody battles; more flute and piano music applied like basting on a turkey; more of Mr Penn risking plagiarism actions by mimicking Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, down to the chanting delivery, the hand gestures that seem to be kneading invisible clay, and the thriftshop clothes: cut-off nylon jacket, trousers stopping above the ankles.
The film's topic is so worthy that one hardly dares to be rude. Registered liberals will set upon me as after Oscar night itself, when shortlisted Penn lost out to the great Afro-American revolution, with only A Beautiful Mind winning for that all-important Hollywood genre, whitefolk in mental crisis. Meanwhile I am staring at an e-mail from a disability charity ordering me not to use the term "retard" in my review, the film's term for its hero, since it is offensive.
Here is what is offensive. Movies that use afflictions of the mind as a climbing frame for actors who feel they won't have Done It All - or won it all - until playing someone crippled in brain or body. Movies that strew product placement through scenes (not just S***bucks but P*zza H*t and S*ven-El*ven) hoping we will notice only subliminally, thereby allowing them to take the county and skip the brickbats. Movies that use emotions - weeping, laughing, loving the shining faces of little tots - as a means of decimating the spectator's own mental age and corralling him into intellectual surrender. And movies that pretend, with a cruelly stupid sentimental optimism, that the mental seven-year-old is more self-sufficient than the flustered career woman. Does the PC brigade really believe that the simple matter-of-fact word "retard" is more affronting than a film that simplifies the condition itself to make a would-be heartwarming fable about holy fools versus heathen go-getters?
Sean Penn is one of my favorite actors, but this article makes a very good point.
The true meaning of 'offensive'
By Nigel Andrews
Published: May 8 2002
Some movie roles should be stamped "O.N.G.": Oscar Nomination Guaranteed. Mentally or physically disabled characters have long been a shoo-in for Academy shortlists. In I Am Sam Sean Penn plays a waiter at a well-known chain coffee shop - begins with "S" - who has a mental age of seven. Although this is at least one year above that of many folk active in Los Angeles, he is thought unsuited to raising a little daughter (Dakota Fanning) whose mother has gone awol. So lawyer Michelle Pfeiffer, a harried yuppie and equally dysfunctional parent (we are nudged to observe in scenes of hurried breakfasts and missed mother-son trysts), fights for him pro bono.
If she loses, little Dakota will be farmed out to wannabe foster mom Laura Dern. If she fails the possibility arises of I Am Sam 2, a nightmare too dreadful to contemplate. More custody battles; more flute and piano music applied like basting on a turkey; more of Mr Penn risking plagiarism actions by mimicking Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, down to the chanting delivery, the hand gestures that seem to be kneading invisible clay, and the thriftshop clothes: cut-off nylon jacket, trousers stopping above the ankles.
The film's topic is so worthy that one hardly dares to be rude. Registered liberals will set upon me as after Oscar night itself, when shortlisted Penn lost out to the great Afro-American revolution, with only A Beautiful Mind winning for that all-important Hollywood genre, whitefolk in mental crisis. Meanwhile I am staring at an e-mail from a disability charity ordering me not to use the term "retard" in my review, the film's term for its hero, since it is offensive.
Here is what is offensive. Movies that use afflictions of the mind as a climbing frame for actors who feel they won't have Done It All - or won it all - until playing someone crippled in brain or body. Movies that strew product placement through scenes (not just S***bucks but P*zza H*t and S*ven-El*ven) hoping we will notice only subliminally, thereby allowing them to take the county and skip the brickbats. Movies that use emotions - weeping, laughing, loving the shining faces of little tots - as a means of decimating the spectator's own mental age and corralling him into intellectual surrender. And movies that pretend, with a cruelly stupid sentimental optimism, that the mental seven-year-old is more self-sufficient than the flustered career woman. Does the PC brigade really believe that the simple matter-of-fact word "retard" is more affronting than a film that simplifies the condition itself to make a would-be heartwarming fable about holy fools versus heathen go-getters?
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illegitimi non carborundum
