Have you heard? The Denver Nuggets are serious about winning. About winning games and winning back the hearts of the fans. Of course, Napoleon was serious about winning at Waterloo. The Germans probably liked their chances in Stalingrad. And the Miami Dolphins rolled into Mile High Stadium Saturday afternoon filled…
The great attorneys of our time–Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks–must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hitman and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil Action as a greedy personal-injury…
It is still the holiday season on the windy, treeless plain that is Dove Valley, and the man who’s overseen the Denver Broncos media machine for 21 seasons is in a mood for parables. “Say your car is stalled on the railroad track,” Jim Saccomano begins, “and the train is…
Best Ten Movies of 1998: 1. Saving Private Ryan. Steven Spielberg’s magnificent, harrowing D day epic is one of the great war movies ever made–and the most disturbing. Can The Thin Red Line match up? 2. Happiness. Director Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) returns to his native New Jersey,…
It was the year of Hurricane Mitch and Typhoon Monica, of Governor Ventura and King Viagra. It was the year they finally played college football at Mile High Stadium (Colorado 42, Colorado State 14), the year Harry Caray and his “Holy Cow!” died. It was the year that boxer Bobby…
The talents of Maya Angelou–she is or has been a teacher, memoirist, prize-winning poet, actress, civil-rights activist, editor, playwright, composer, dancer, producer, theater and TV director, and advisor to three presidents–range so far and deep that no feat she accomplishes could come as a surprise. Give this quick study three…
At the heart of Pat O’Connor’s rich, bittersweet Dancing at Lughnasa lies the quaint notion that once upon a time, people–especially women–whose youthful dreams were dashed, even those who lived entire lives of quiet desperation, might attain a state of grace, a kind of ascetic nobility to which the rest…
Ultra-tough-guy Jesse “The Body” Ventura says he means business as the new governor of Minnesota. But for now the nasty crime wave in that state continues unchecked–at the movies, anyway. Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a psychological thriller that shows us how dangerous life can get after three ordinary men…
The relentless charm of Kirk Jones’s Waking Ned Devine lies in its embrace of two lovable Irish geezers who manage to work beautiful mischief on the world, in the raw beauty of their sun-splashed coastal village, and in the general notion that Ireland is the land of poetic conversations, enduring…
The finest professional athlete in Colorado will earn less than $15,000 this year. He has no sneaker contract (always goes barefoot) and will never be bothered by autograph hounds (couldn’t catch him if they tried). On December 2 he celebrated his second birthday, but by this time next year, his…
Joe DiMaggio is dying. The most graceful center-fielder ever to play baseball, one of the game’s finest hitters and a fathomless mystery for six decades, is lying in a Hollywood, Florida, hospital, a couple of miles from the major-league spring training site where he first materialized in 1936. Characteristically, no…
A third of the way through Home Fries, you may begin wondering if the filmmakers haven’t outsmarted themselves. Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that’s so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules and dashing expectations on the road…
The rules of life don’t change much. Never buy loose diamonds from a man in lizard-skin cowboy boots. Remain faithful to your beloved. At a mile and an eighth, always consider Eddie Delahoussaye’s horse. Once past the age of twelve, never, ever request an autograph–not from John Elway, not from…
Holed up with his Sidney Bechet records, old flannel shirts and dog-eared copy of War and Peace, Woody Allen has made a second career of shunning fad, fashion and fame–and of ostensibly keeping to himself in the most populous city in the United States. No nouveau-grooveau glitz or designer drugs…
Pile your bowl high with Flutie Flakes and get a load of this. Among the thirty National Football League quarterbacks who held starting jobs at the beginning of September, eighteen are, for one reason or another, out of the picture right now. In San Diego, errant Washington State rookie Ryan…
The hero of Evan Dunsky’s The Alarmist is a dopey innocent named Tommy Hudler (Scream’s David Arquette) whose only sin seems to be falling in with the wrong crowd. A rookie salesman with all the aggression of a baby chick, Tommy sells residential burglar alarms door-to-door in Los Angeles for…
Among the grand heroics and tragic disturbances of humankind, the performance of a baseball team is a puny thing. But it looms awfully large right now for a lot of people. Why, just the other night, in a saloon that shall remain nameless, I witnessed a bar-pounding, drink-spilling, shoulder-shoving exchange…
As a requiem for the Sixties, The Big Chill didn’t quite hit the mark the first time around, in 1983. Its greatest-hits soundtrack was soul-stirring, all right; it’s hard to top the Stones, Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin in any decade. But the shameless way in which director Lawrence Kasdan…
There are no distractions. At Barry Fey’s house, the parrot keeps screeching at the dog. The phone won’t stop ringing, and Barry’s beleaguered assistant, Leslie, just can’t find the wallet-sized photos of the first time he won the big handicapping tournament in Vegas. The guy is here to fix one…
At the beginning of Gary Ross’s Pleasantville, two unhappy suburban teenagers (is there any other kind?) fall down the rabbit hole of their TV set and find themselves trapped in a parallel universe–a 1950s sitcom more idealized than Ozzie and Harriet, sweeter than Father Knows Best. In this black-and-white realm,…
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young black hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
