ProjectX Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Some of cinema's most iconic shots of Chicago appear in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the film is certainly Matthew Broderick's most iconic role. So, it's hard to watch the actor in the Chicago-set Diminished Capacity and not ask yourself, "is this what's happened to Ferris?" He is now relatively passive, paunchy and pitiful in the role of Cooper, a newspaper editor who has recently suffered a mildly debilitating concussion. And the character could be classified as yet another sad sack, one of three such parts he can be seen playing at present (Then She Found Me opened in April and is still in theaters; Finding Amanda debuted last week).

But is it fair that we most associate Broderick with Ferris, thereby continuing our disappointment in seeing him play one nebbish nobody after another? Couldn't we redirect our memories and accept that Broderick's modern roles are more like grown-up versions of Eugene Jerome, of Neil Simon's plays Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues, who he portrayed on Broadway as well as in the film adaptation of Biloxi? Were Eugene not the fictional incarnation of Simon and had he not therefore become a famous writer (and were he not from an earlier time period), the character surely could have gone on to be the pathetic teacher of Election or Then She Found Me or the absentminded editor of Diminished Capacity.

I would much rather watch a TV special in which Sigourney Weaver revisits the aliens, but instead the BBC has documented the actress' return to Rwanda and her animal co-stars from Gorillas in the Mist. Wait, the aliens weren't real? And the gorillas were? Both had me fooled when I was a kid. No, actually I had a great appreciation for Mist for being, along with Project X, a rare movie that actually took apes seriously instead of making them play sports or featuring extra-large versions of them or, worst of all, creating fake versions with hokey sign-language translators.

Weaver earned her second Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Dian Fossey in Mist and she's been wanting to return to the location and to the animals for a long time, but she couldn't because of Rwanda's civil unrest over the years. Now, 18 years later, she was able to make the trip and include it in the documentary, which is primarily about the gorilla conservation program run by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International.

Animal Planet is running the one-hour doc, called Gorillas Revisited with Sigourney Weaver, on Sunday night.