'August: Osage County': Great play ... but a bad movie

The comforting thing about putting up a use Broadway is the fact you will discover weeks of previews. If actors are pursuing mistaken ideas about their character, should they have a bad tone in the show inappropriate, they're going to exit before a live audience and lay an egg - and afterward be humbly receptive to regardless of the director and playwright ought to say. After a while, the ensemble arrive together in search of one particular vision, and a play that seemed like nonsense fortnight before will probably be revealed as genius when it opens for critics.

Alas, with movies, that isn't the situation. The actors go prior to cameras with the information is all around a first draft, that makes the guidance of your strong director all-important. But what happens when the director is actually comparatively inexperienced at directing features? And what goes on when the actress destroying the movie is rightly acknowledged as one of the primary on this planet? You then hold the formula for disaster - for "August: Osage County," a thoroughly botched, distorted and unrealized rendering of any brilliant American play.


The failure with this film can be an occasion for longer than perfunctory lamentation, because doing so represents something beyond a missed opportunity. Movies can be shown everywhere and flicks are forever, so this film will perform the duties of a regular bad-will ambassador for just a great work of art, not only around the world but down through time. Already, intelligent folks who never saw the play are speculating that perhaps the film revealed weaknesses in Tracy Letts' writing - but no, which is not the situation. Not at all.

The problem was that director John Wells did not understand the play, or anyway, he failed to make his actors understand the play, even at its most basic level. Here's one little example: The actors onscreen are under the impression that they are inside a straight drama, and they're not. They're in a really dark comedy.

Perhaps the tonal weirdness in the film can best be expressed this way: A minimum of 80 percent of what's wrong with "August: Osage County" may have been solved by casting June Squibb ("Nebraska") ahead(p) role as opposed to Meryl Streep.

Pill-popping monster
As conceived by Letts, Violet is usually a pill-popping monster, an evil matriarch that has a foul and vicious mouth, utterly confident and thrilled with herself, certainly not self-pitying, although she'll feign self-pity if she should. She is some of those grand characters make fish an audience sees and within seconds knows, OK, we will have fun back with her. Deanna Dunagan's Broadway performance was one to the ages, and she or he was succeeded by Estelle Parsons ("Bonnie and Clyde"), simply to present you with a perception of the correct vibe.

Horrible, but funny. Which is the role. Over the role, it's the whole play - its appeal, its nature, its genre. So what on earth happens? Meryl Streep walks into her first scene, like she's playing Mary Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey Into Night," and shortly delivers a key line, one inch which Violet lashes out at her husband and establishes her character inside a sentence: "You will want to go f- a f-' sow's ass?" The road can't quite be printed, but even its shadow identifies it appalling and funny, instead of the sad cry on the heart that Streep plays.
Needs strong director
Perhaps braying stridency is outside Streep's range. Perhaps she had a strange want to take a step different. Perhaps she had a weird accept the script. Largest or combination of reasons, Streep digs deep inside and locates Violet's sadness, her vulnerability, her intelligence and also her inner child and hammers on those qualities from the entrance. These ought to be discoveries, a result of layers being pulled off during the action, as well as then, they must be subtle and balanced by way of a host of other, less flattering qualities, like spite and resentment.

Is another case of the movie star's insisting on being likable, or are these claims a bad mistake? Either way, this is in which a strong director needed to step up, save his actress and rescue the image.

Everything else onscreen can be a 50-car pileup. Streep will be the accident. As Violet's eldest daughter, Julia Roberts matches Streep, and she's fine, though early never good to present Roberts a reason to do something sullen. Julianne Nicholson brings sensitivity and presence to the relatively straight role from the middle sister, Ivy. But only Juliette Lewis as the youngest sister, Karen, and Margo Martindale as Aunt Mattie Fae use a complete grasp on the material's proper tone, which can be less than realistic but mixes black comedy with drama.

Throughout, Wells seems lost. The blocking in the actors and also the cutting are arbitrary, without any psychological or dramatic purpose. A single example, Chris Cooper, as the genial uncle, delivers a blistering takedown of his abusive wife and storms off. But Wells undercuts the impact of his exit insurance firms the camera float outside, showing Charlie, in the long shot, just standing around doing nothing.

"August: Osage County" was a three-hour play that felt like 120 minutes. Many experts have made into a two-hour movie that appears like a month.

Lung cancer rates down, with a narrowing gender gap

Invasive carcinoma of the lung, still the class leading cause of cancer deaths in the us, claimed fewer lives within the five-year period ending in '09, says an investigation issued Thursday through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Driven usually by the achievements of anti-tobacco campaigns, the decline in united states was greater in men than in women, however.
The grim result: a longstanding gender gap, by which women have lagged behind men in cancer of the lung rates, is narrowing.
50 years following U.S. surgeon general declared tobacco a hazard towards public's health, higher than a million new cases of cancer of the lung were diagnosed from 2005 to 2009, based on the CDC's latest accounting. Greater than two-thirds of the diagnoses were in males and some women 65 older, and rates of united states in those groups showed the most modest declines.
After the 1964 surgeon general report unambiguously identifying tobacco use as a source of disease, the rise within the number of women starting the habit of smoking has outpaced that of men. And women have quit in a slower rate than men. Lung cancers reflected the convergence of smoking rates that face men and women across the board: There was clearly 569,366 lung cancers diagnosed in men between 2005 and 2009, and 465,027 among women.
Among men between your ages of 35 and 64, carcinoma of the lung rates showed substantial declines and were most pronounced (down 6.5% annually during 2005-2009) one of several youngest men, 35 to 44, as group. The incidence of lung cancers declined markedly in women ages 35 to 44 and 55 to 64 (down annually 5.8% and 3.7%, respectively).　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Dallas escorts
Though the rate of invasive lung cancer scarcely budged among women ages 45 to 54 (down annually 0.1%). Born inside the 1950s and 1960s, these women were young adults through the 1970s, when women were the targets of aggressive marketing campaigns by tobacco companies.　　　　　　　　Dallas escorts review
Overall, the Northeast saw the actual declines in cancer of the lung rates. However , many states -- Alabama, Mississippi and Alaska -- were notable for insufficient progress in driving down lung cancer rates.
The CDC has termed united states a "winnable battle" because 80% to 90% of lung cancers is usually attributed directly to tobacco use as well as to secondhand smoke. (Environmental exposures, including to radon and to air pollutants, can also be a factor in lung cancers.) But the march toward victory has lost momentum, the agency suggested.
In the editorial note accompanying its report, the CDC chided states for devoting only $640 million to tobacco control efforts in 2010. That comes from merely a 2.4% of their annual state tobacco revenues and less the one-fifth the annual budget -- $3.7 billion -- that CDC has estimated could be necessary to sustain comprehensive tobacco control programs over the states.