A Great Review from Total Film Magazine and Funny Too! The last 2 pages are the ones to read. Click on the pics and then click again in photobucket to enlarge.
http://www.robsessedpattinson.com/2011/04/robert-pattinson-water-for-elephants_09.html
IMO I think this review is exceptionally intelligent and a very accurate assessment. It is also hilariously funny, witty and snarky. What a pleasure after reading mainstream media boring garbage and all those professional smilers interviewing Rob Pattinson along with Reese to show how great they look together. Fox is following Scummit in their pimping of Rob to sell the tickets. Cronenberg has swiped at Francis Lawrence when he criticizes Waltz for leaving his Freud and Jung cast to do WFE, the big budget Hollywood mass pleaser entertainment. Long after WFE is being sold at yard sales, Cronenberg's Freud and Jung film will still be a collector's item and a classic after we are all dead. The reviewer's assessment of a watered down Landa, a still smouldering Rob and Reese with a brand new set of tricks and skills. Wow!
Of course the real star will be Tai the elephant.
Gruen's book is an inch above the young adult shelf, but that's probably where most readers fit anyway. At least for the best sellers that will be in the bin in a possible future in the thrift stores, along with all the rest of those mass best sellers:Edna Ferber, Taylor Caldwell, Frank Yerby, Uris et al. Go to Amazon and read reviews if you want to know more. Her strength is her research on 1930's circuses and the grainy photos included. This part pimps the book just fine.
And now for Baudrillard's assessment of this kind of film. The elaborate set for shooting was composed of 150% of authentic objects of 1930's vintage. Nothing was modern. All was more real than real. In fact the recreated circus set was a simulacrum.
A simulacrum is defined as a copy having no original. Baudrillard writes and says that this historical perfectness in being more historically real than historically real, read hyperreal, is just another piece of reality being stolen from us in homeopathic doses. For those left living who remember what those times were like, their memories will be effaced, wiped out by the overlay of this simulacrum set for the film.
So folks, this is nostalgia being fed to us by Hollywood presents. And the ticket buyers are going to eat it up. Can't you just hear the ooohs and ahhhs now.
