英文影评: 不老泉 Tuck Everlasting review by Stephanie Zacharek

英文影评: 不老泉 Tuck Everlasting review by Stephanie Zacharek 
不老泉,Tuck Everlasting

 

"Tuck Everlasting" is a neo-vampire movie for tender-hearted preadolescent girls who are afraid of . If that's your thing, go for it. But there's something genuinely creepy, and not in the good way, about this story of a family whose members, having drunk from a magic forest spring, stay exactly the same for hundreds of years. They're forever doomed to keep to themselves and watch wistfully as the world swirls by around them in its eternal spin-cycle of renewal.

 

After a pert 15-year-old rich-girl outsider named Winnie (Alexis Bledel) accidentally stumbles onto the Tucks' secret babbling brook, daddy Angus Tuck (William Hurt) explains ruefully, "What we Tucks are, you can't call it livin'." You can't call it actin' either, but that's not even the major problem with "Tuck Everlasting." Adapted by director Jay Russell ("My Dog Skip") from Natalie Babbitt's popular 1975 young-adult novel of the same name, the picture has trouble finding the right tone: It wobbles ineptly between enchantment, spookiness and gassy profundity. "Don't be afraid of death -- be afraid of the unlived life" is the movie's message, delivered (more than once) at the expense of a coherent story with any real sense of drama.

 

But then, lessons are really all that matter in movies like this one. "Tuck Everlasting" is set in 1914; the Tucks have been kicking around since early in the century before -- they're lost people in some very old clothes. Mae (Sissy Spacek, who manages to hold onto some shred of dignity in a dismal role) and Angus head up this forlorn clan. Miles (a glowering Scott Bairstow), the embittered older son, used to be married, but when his wife found out the family secret, she took the couple's two kids and hit the road. (In a wordless flashback sequence, we see her flashing her eyes angrily at this family of weirdos, and we don't for a minute blame her.) The youngest Tuck, Jesse (Jonathan Jackson), is 17 going on 104 and has never been laid, so you can imagine what goes on in his head when he lays eyes on the luscious Winnie.

 

That's suggested, of course, but "Tuck Everlasting," by virtue of being a squeaky-clean tale for young adults, can't get anywhere near an even remotely believable truth about the nature of young love and lust. Protective parents will be pleased to note that there's very little ual innuendo in "Tuck Everlasting," save a chaste scene in which Jesse and Winnie cavort, semiclothed, under a waterfall. And good old-fashioned pioneer values are upheld throughout: We get to see Mae kill a bad guy by clocking him on the head with a shotgun. "Tuck Everlasting" is a movie with its priorities in the right place.

 

*小建议*如果你喜欢这篇文章,可以顶上去;或者Copy下这篇文章的链接发给MSN或QQ上的朋友; 我们永远相信,分享是一种美德,Great People Share Knowledge... (130影萍网谢谢您的关注和支持！)

上一篇：英文影评: 不老泉 Tuck Everlasting review by James Berardinelli
下一篇：英文影评: 不老泉 Tuck Everlasting review by MaryAnn Johanson