Entertainment Weekly’s website has a short but interesting piece reflecting on the career of Sydney Pollack, who passed away earlier this week. Here is an excerpt:
Sydney Pollack made movies for grownups. He didn’t make movies about teenager-stalking slashers or CGI monsters or men in tights (well, except for Tootsie). The director, who died yesterday at 73, seems like the last of a breed, a filmmaker who specialized in old-fashioned, star-driven, sweeping romances and epics of the kind that used to win Oscars but that Hollywood has all but forgotten how to make. (About the only other director of recent years who still made such anachronistic spectacles was Pollack’s producing partner, Anthony Minghella, who died just two months ago.) It’s hard to imagine anyone trying nowadays to make a romance with the sprawl and scope of The Way We Were or Out of Africa, movies with artistic ambition, star-powered glamour, and faith that there are enough adult ticketbuyers to make them hits without pandering.