journal features

movie review - Slums of Beverly Hills

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 1999.03.14

In a word? Breasts. From the perspective of a lone daughter in a single-parent family with two brothers, an unemployed father, and no fixed address. With no mother figure, she's been left to figure out her sudden breasts on her own, and she's gotten nowhere. The men in her life are all apparently busy with a variety of schemes, including her brother the incipient actor, her father the suitor of a wealthy widow, and her would-be boyfriend the dope pedlar. Coming to her rescue is her junkie cousin, a woman older by a decade but no further ahead in getting her act together than any other character in the film.

Slums... is funny and entertaining, though a little over-the-top when the writers start fumbling for the heart strings. It's got a great cast and an original story. Yeah!

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton