Dedee Truitt, the smirky sixteen-year-old temptress who narrates and dominates Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex, is a conniving but somehow sympathetic little shrew who’s bailed out on her feelings early in life. A kind of Lolita-without-portfolio, she gets herself pregnant by a Bible-thumping redneck from Louisiana, then sets out…
If you had a nickel for every man, woman and child watching the World Cup on television, you could buy Denmark–or maybe a decent lunch for two in Paris. Astonishing but true: Around the globe, 37 billion people are currently glued to their sets as assorted South Africans, Paraguayans, Dutchmen…
Better check your popcorn for microchip implants. And make damn sure that the guy sitting behind you at the multiplex isn’t the Cigarette-Smoking Man. Just in time for the summer blockbuster season, 20th Century Fox has released its $60 million movie version of The X-Files, and if you’re not already…
It was once said of Honore de Balzac: “Next to God and Shakespeare, he is the greatest creator of human beings.” In his time, which was the first half of the nineteenth century, this driven Frenchman wrote more than sixty novels and countless shorter tales–passionate, sprawling, obsessively detailed. Each was…
In his storied playing career with the Denver Nuggets, Dan Issel amassed 16,589 points and pulled down 6,630 rebounds–both club records. Now his daunting task is to score a few points with the fans. And any kind of Nuggets rebound will be welcome. As the new vice president, general manager…
John Duigan’s Lawn Dogs is the kind of arch, postmodern fairy tale in which the little girl who’s gone wandering in the dark forest winds up pointing an automatic pistol at her insufferable father’s head, and the mysterious boy who’s become her secret friend makes his getaway from demons in…
There are cheap thrills aplenty in Nick Broomfield’s scandal-enhanced, self-serving wreck of a documentary, Kurt and Courtney. For one thing, its out-of-the-picture protagonist is Kurt Cobain, the latest dead junkie rock star to be canonized as “the voice of his generation” before the body was even cold. For another, its…
When it was all over, rider Kent Desormeaux said he felt sick to his stomach. Then proved it. He had asked his mount for winning speed too soon, he said gloomily, then let the horse’s attention wander with a furlong to go. Down in the jockeys’ room, Chris McCarron draped…
Members of the Norwegian tourist board won’t be flipping cartwheels over the dingy, smothering, rain-sodden views of the Oslo slums director Pal Sletaune employs in his new feature Junk Mail. And the film’s scruffy, rat-faced protagonist, Roy (Robert Skj3/4rstad), a furtive postman who takes revenge on his nasty bosses by…
In the midst of the ludicrous national episode just past, it became clear that Americans were far more interested in the fictional fate of Jerry Seinfeld and his pals than in their actual friends and loved ones. You can also bet that the sexual politics of Ellen Degeneres, trumpeted on…
Last Wednesday night, Michael Jordan threw a little outside fake, stopped short and rose from the floor of the United Center like an ascending saint. The soft jumper hit dead center, of course, and just like that, His Airness had the 34,999th and 35,000th points of his storied career. Even…
Vyacheslav Krishtofovich’s A Friend of the Deceased provides another eye-opening glimpse of the former Soviet Union in this era of P.T. Barnum capitalism and spiritual confusion. Whatever else may be dense in the film, that’s worth our undivided attention. The place is Kiev, where the joyless hero, a translator named…
When last we spied Sandra Bullock, the plucky action heroine was clinging to a sea-washed railing aboard Hollywood’s other doomed ocean liner–not the one that hit the major ice cube, but the one that plowed through a Caribbean resort town while audiences hooted with unintended laughter. Speed 2: Cruise Control…
How about those catcalls raining down from the cheap seats–okay, the $15 seats–every time Pedro Astacio blows another lead or Mike Lansing takes a called third strike with the bases loaded? Strange sounds, no? The public mood, once mild and appreciative, is getting understandably nasty up there. And neither Mike…
The focus of documentarian Barbara Kopple’s Wild Man Blues is Woody Allen the clarinet player. Not Woody Allen the comedian and filmmaker, not the cradle-robber, not even Woody the world-class worrywart. Kopple’s subject, plain and simple, is the Woody Allen who can knock out a passable version of “Down by…
Moviemakers have been making themselves miserable wrestling with Les Miserables for almost ninety years. The very first American feature film was a 1909 silent adaptation of Victor Hugo’s dark masterpiece, and it’s been reprised on the screen at least half a dozen times since then. Most memorable? The 1935 version,…
Is the Bolder Boulder a Racist Race? Everyone but Patsy Ramsey and a couple of blissed-out hippie leftovers up Sunshine Canyon seems to have an opinion on that. As the famous distance race draws near (May 25), organizers feeling pressure from the glare of a New York Times article and…
It was just a matter of time until hoops junkie and courtside loudmouth Spike Lee got around to making a basketball picture. It’s called He Got Game, and it means to be, in part, Lee’s antidote to his bluntly stated claim that “most sports movies suck.” It takes a talent…
The single joke that has to power The Big Hit from start to finish is that the nice, polite suburban boy who wants everybody to like him and who meekly takes guff from the nerdy clerk at the video store is also a cold-blooded hitman who has whacked a hundred…
On the eve of this year’s Kentucky Derby, everybody in horse racing–from the poorest groom out in the stable to the sleekest zillionaire up in the turf club–is worried sick about the future. Racing fans are getting longer in the tooth as track attendance and revenues continue to decline. Competition…
Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors is a romantic fantasy blessed with such intelligence, charm and lethal wit that most viewers probably won’t notice that its hip and plucky heroine, an embattled London publicist named Helen, is played by an American actress affecting a clipped British accent. What they will notice is…
Give all the folks who finally got The Object of My Affection to the multiplex credit for perseverance. In the course of its decade-long journey from page to screen, this much-troubled tale about the unrequited love affair of a heterosexual social worker and a gay first-grade teacher has gone through…
