CVK
Robert Towne’s adaptation of the Depression era novel, Ask the Dust, has received mixed reviews. I haven’t seen it yet, so if any of you MMW readers have, I’d love to know what you thought of it. At the heart of the story is a mixed couple: an Italian-American man and a Mexican-American woman played by Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, respectively. He hopes to assimilate into Hollywood with a blonde on his arm and she hopes to marry a rich American. But instead, they’re drawn to each other. Here are some excerpts from the Village Voice review:

Bandini finds it in the course of a miserable erotic fixation with the illiterate, sexually provocative waitress Camilla Lopez. (Theirs is a memorably disagreeable meet-cute: He insults her worn huaraches, she wishes him heart failure, he dumps a half-cup of coffee on her table.)

Fueled by shame and prejudice, the doomed relationship of these two proud self-haters is more drunken knife fight than transcendent love affair… Ultimately, Ask the Dust has been less adapted than gentrified; a saga of masochistic torment transformed into a sentimental love story. According to the press notes, Towne’s hopeful sell line is “ Wuthering Heights in Bunker Hill.”