items tagged with Happiness

Last week, I received an e-mail from a reader asking whether I thought Ang Lee’s wildly acclaimed Brokeback Mountain would be playing in the area any time soon. She also referenced Capote and The Squid & the Whale – two other small-scale, independently financed films with a whole slew of end-of-the-year accolades and no current release date set for Quad Cities venues – and concluded her correspondence with a cry often heard from we Midwestern art-film fans: “Are we not grown-up enough to see these films?”

2 FAST 2 FURIOUS

How did this happen? How, in a summer chockablock with megahit wannabes of all sorts, did the major studios agree to get out of Universal’s way and allow 2 Fast 2 Furious to be the only new release of the June 6 weekend? Are the powers-that-be at Universal holding compromising photos involving the rival studio heads? Are they holding their pets hostage? Why, for the love of God, are Universal’s competitors letting this terrible movie become a hit? Granted, the opening five minutes are fun, and there’s a squirmy torture scene involving a rat attempting to burrow through a man’s stomach.