Once upon a time, in a game far, far away, a princess named Chris Evert started collecting U.S. Open tennis titles like charms on a bracelet. Her racquet was wooden, her dress was snow-white, and her words were measured–if she spoke at all. When the announcers at tournaments called her…
Seen one way, Manuel Pradal’s Marie Baie des Anges is a self-consciously artsy examination of teen anxiety and teen violence done up with pretensions and gewgaws that the most self-absorbed auteur might disdain. Seen in another light, it’s a disturbing vision that manages to capture, through bizarre editing, fractured narrative…
You have to love the way Terry McMillan does literary research. On a spur-of-the-moment vacation trip to Jamaica, the author of Disappearing Acts and Waiting to Exhale says, she indulged in a mad, revitalizing fling with a man twenty years younger. Despite the rum punches and the hot and heavy,…
Can DeGeezer still throw DeBomb? That’s the question coaches, players and fans are asking this simmering August in Atlanta, Georgia. At the age of 44, veteran NFL quarterback Steve DeBerg has returned from five long years of retirement (and two years of coaching) to become backup to the Falcons’ oft-injured…
If you need new evidence of Hollywood’s current impoverishment of thought and deed, look no further than the ongoing siege against European movies. Not content to crank out sequels and recycle old TV shows into the multiplexes, the safety-first moguls have “remade” (translation: filched and dumbed-down), among others, the Godard…
John Hamburg’s independent comedy Safe Men, which got a look and a distributor at Sundance, trades on one of the oldest comic devices in moviedom: Innocence collides with corruption and changes both of them for the better. From the great silent comedian Harry Langdon, who made a high art of…
For a fellow who’s regarded as one of baseball’s old goats, commissioner Bud Selig has been remarkably flexible when it comes to certain innovations. While he was still “acting” commissioner–an impermanence that lasted six years–Selig pushed each league to split into three regional divisions and add a wild card team,…
Anna Stockard, the high school senior facing the abyss in Susan Skoog’s Whatever, comes straight out of the dazed-and-confused school of anxiety that now dominates movies about adolescence. Anna’s father has long since vanished. Her mother is a frowzy desperado who rolls home to their suburban split-level at 7 a.m…
They’re old. Starting with the left guard, who’s undergone twenty surgeries since high school, they’ve got more dents than a demolition derby. The owner has painted lurid orange flames on their new unis, so they look less like Super Bowl champs than an arena-ball club on the make. After crying…
Can you make a satisfying high-tech thriller for $60,000? You can if you’re 28-year-old Darren Aronofsky, late of Harvard and the American Film Institute’s directing program, and you get everyone you know to chip in a hundred bucks on the prospect that if the picture makes a profit you’ll be…
It has taken twenty-six years for some smart aleck to come up with a fullscale parody of The Godfather, so the question now is: Who wants to see it? Many of the 16- to 24-year-olds who flock to movie theaters in the summertime may not know Michael Corleone from Michael…
The New York Yankees lost three times last week. You could look it up. But the rest of the picture remained pretty grim. Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter was still hitting .320 and keeping company with singer Mariah Carey. David Wells, the huge, unkempt moose of a Yankees pitcher who paid…
Hal Hartley’s gallery of troubled eccentrics already features two bickering brothers in search of their lost father (Simple Men), three mix-and-match couples afflicted by identical love woes in three far-flung cities (Flirt) and the unlikely triptych of sexually obsessed virgin, bewildered amnesiac and ex-porn star (Amateur). How do you top…
The first half-hour of Steven Spielberg’s magnificent and terrifying war epic Saving Private Ryan unfolds at bloody Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and is likely the most graphic re-creation of men in battle ever committed to film. Petrified GIs huddling in the wave-bashed landing craft vomit into their…
Another day at the office: Shelly Anderson slams her foot down and the ground shakes. The stench of tire smoke and the sting of burning nitromethane shoot into the crowd. Almost 6,000 horsepower–enough to drive an ocean liner–leaps into the rear wheels, and five G’s of force smash Shelly deep…
The last place you want to visit in mid-winter is gray, freezing Buffalo, New York. The last people you want to see in the last place you want to visit are Jimmy and Janet Brown, a pair of comic demons so indifferent, so surreally out of touch, that they scarcely…
Billed as the first commercial film written, directed and co-produced by American Indians, Smoke Signals could be a sign of the truth-telling breakthrough they have deserved ever since John Wayne’s cavalry undertook to slaughter the “savages,” Jay Silverheels played sidekick, and Jeff Chandler was cast as Cochise. With the possible…
Grab a bag of peanuts, crack a cold beer and make yourself at home while we administer today’s number-association test. Here goes: Fifty-six. Sixty-one. Five hundred and eleven. Seven hundred and fifty-five. Four thousand one hundred and ninety-one. Point three-six-seven. Three. Two. One. Simple, wasn’t it? Piece of cake. Any…
If you loved Don Rickles as the acid-tongued voice of Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story, wait till you get a load of Tommy Lee Jones’s gung-ho warmonger, Major Chip Hazard, in Small Soldiers. In Joe Dante’s uncommonly clever fantasy, Jones’s “character” is a military action figure just twelve inches…
Imps, waifs, big-eyed orphans and lovable mischief-makers have been the movies’ stock-in-trade since the first one-reeler cranked, and apparently they still enthrall the popcorn-munching public as completely as they torment the grownups forced to share credits with them. The presence of a braying Shirley Temple or an intractable Macaulay Culkin…
Last Saturday, three days before the All-Star Game, Petey Maestas waited two hours for the chance to hit a home run off Randy Johnson. Johnson, the hawk-nosed, fright-wigged, six-foot-ten-inch flamethrower of the Seattle Mariners, has not been enjoying the best of seasons–seven wins, seven losses, seventeen home runs yielded in…
Here’s welcome news from the Emerald Isle. The obsessions of Ireland’s fledgling movie industry–religion, tragic politics and misty folklore–are nowhere to be found in Paddy Breathnach’s I Went Down. There are no glorious views of the verdant Irish countryside, no half-soused balladeering about the good old days, no impassioned cries…
