Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must–create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem!) think deeply–although this…
The evidence of where you are (and what you are) presents itself at 8:35 a.m. on a balmy Monday when, in the company of strangers, you order the Roz Eye Opener–served 7 to 10 a.m. only. Annie the bartender, who’s been doing this for years, brings it on–a foamy glass…
By acclamation, April is the coolest month. Confident that last year’s ignominy will be transfigured into this year’s triumph, baseball players and full-grown fans enter this month with the wide-eyed wonder of children, fond dreams intact and energies aloft. In Pittsburgh’s April dawn, the Pirates win the pennant going away…
At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
The hot splendors of Carlos Saura’s Tango are supported by a scrap of plot, and that’s all it needs. The soul-searching Spanish director of Peppermint Frappe and Taxi, who previously showed us his passion for dance with 1995’s Flamenco, leaps into tangomania like a man falling hopelessly in love–with no…
If Darryl Kile is conversant with the Navier-Stokes Equation or the Magnus Effect, he’s not letting on. The man who was supposed to reinvigorate the Colorado Rockies’ demoralized pitching staff last season and lead the club out of the doldrums wound up with a 13-17 record. At Coors Field, which…
In James Moll’s documentary The Last Days, the third film the young producer/director has created for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, five Hungarian Jews who lived through the horrors of the Nazi death camps and eventually immigrated to the United States describe their experiences before, during…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
They’re not very tall. They’re not whippet-fast. In the eighth game of the season, their starting center crashed to the floor, shattering both wrists and putting their dreams in jeopardy. In places like Knoxville, Tennessee, Storrs, Connecticut, and the slam-dunk-crazed Carolinas, not even hardwood junkies know who they are. Just…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
Stalking the crucial puberty-to-prom-night demographic can be a hazardous business, leading studio bankers and unwary moviemakers into some gruesomely familiar dead ends. That’s just what’s happened in the case of a sleep-inducing teen melodrama called Jawbreaker. Billed as the inevitable result of all the suburban slasher flicks and high-school comedies…
What the puck. When it was over, Sylvain Lefebvre could finally replace his lucky shoelaces. The TV producers up in the booth could take a break from the special chocolate-cake ritual they’ve been into for a month. Sandis Ozolinsh could get through a pre-game meditation without twelve or fourteen teammates…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
The beefy fortune tellers of the National Football League have gazed into their tea leaves and come up with a prophecy: John Elway will return for another season. One last hurrah. The Final Final. The I-Really-Mean-It-This-Time Actual Blaze of Glory Farewell. Fortified by umbrella drinks and sunshine, the assembled gladiators…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed forty-year-old junkie wearing a devil’s-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
Want to stage the Olympic Games in your town? There’s nothing to it, really, but there are a couple of things you need to know. First of all, you’ll have to appoint some committees. No potential site worth its five interlocking rings can hope to land the Olympics without 150…
For a good ol’ red-dirt Georgia boy, that Dan Reeves sure has got one pow’ful sense of theater. First he ups and coaxes a 44-year-old back-up quarterback out of retirement because they go back to the leather-helmet days together, and then, when things get rough for his fragile starter, Dan…
The coldhearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the several hazards of Hollywood “disease movies”–false sentiment, synthetic emotion and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in 4-x-4s with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary-confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry Lawford,…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst onto Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language combining…
