Listen, Bubba. Come dawn this Sunday morning, U.S. time, the world’s most exotic race cars will be screaming around the circuit at Imola, in the tiny European principality of San Marino, at 185 miles an hour. Blood-red Ferraris and sleek silver McLaren-Mercedeses, pinnacles of the automotive engineering art, will excite…
When it comes to gamesmanship and the testosterone wars, no writer in America is more obsessed than David Mamet. Whether his combatants are duking it out in a seedy Chicago real estate office (Glengarry Glen Ross) or fighting for survival in the Arctic wastes (The Edge), the story remains the…
Moviegoers who’ve grown immune to Christopher Walken’s dark charms won’t be breaking the doors down to buy a ticket for Suicide Kings. Its centerpiece is an all-out, full-throttle dose of the Walken weirdness as he portrays a semi-retired New York mafioso who’s kidnapped by a quartet of privileged but street-stupid…
The 27 million Americans who play golf–and 100 million who don’t–understand that Jack Nicklaus is the best ever to put on yellow plaid trousers. In his day, he was the longest, straightest driver and the finest clutch putter of all time. Among the four-score trophies in his breakfront are a…
If American movie moguls really thought like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, they’d probably spend more time blowing up Federal Reserve banks than calculating first-weekend grosses. As it is, instead of buying inflammable fertilizer and fuel oil, the moguls are selling it–in the form of satires about presidential misconduct and…
It has been thirty years since compulsive fussbudget Felix Unger began clearing away the moldy bread crusts, stale cigar butts and melted candy bars from the New York apartment of dedicated slob Oscar Madison, thirty years since Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau joined a battle of wills and a farce…
As Pokey Reese can tell you, this is the year in which some of baseball’s most cherished records are likely to be demolished. Pokey himself got the ball rolling on opening day by committing four errors at shortstop in support of his Cincinnati Reds’ 10-2 loss to San Diego. There’s…
When Denver’s own Donna Dewey won an Academy Award last week for her short documentary A Story of Healing, moviegoers here were reminded that not every example of the art cinematic springs full-grown from the city of Los Angeles. The notion arose again on Sunday night, when the Creative Film…
The great charm of Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys derives from its quartet of matinee idols–Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich, Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio–and its unbridled affection for the high-spirited gang of Texas country boys they portray, adventurers who rob banks with such sunny enthusiasm and impeccable yes-ma’am manners that…
You are likely to take to The Real Blonde, a bittersweet farce about romantic yearning and delusional ambition in Manhattan, in direct proportion to your tolerance for self-absorbed 25-year-olds and the value you put on the advertising and theatrical trades. If, for instance, you can stomach the waiter who believes…
When Mike Tyson announced last week that he was willing to part with the unabridged, uncensored story of his life for, say, three or four million bucks, you can bet the Pulitzer Prize committee and the people who hand out the Nobels sat up and took notice. Listen. Solzhenitsyn may…
Still have your doubts that Western civilization has been conquered by sixth-grade dropouts snorting meth? No longer. Hollywood has just now released the first film noir for teenagers–a boiling stew of greed, betrayal, murder and three-way sex in which the female characters have not yet graduated from high school and…
In the course of an extraordinary acting career, Gary Oldman has portrayed, among other outcasts, the drug-addled punk rocker Sid Vicious, the possible presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the notorious bloodsucker Count Dracula. They’re all choirboys compared to the barbarous South London blokes Oldman gives us in Nil by…
The most dangerous slugger in the major leagues is not Ken Griffey Jr., Larry Walker or Mark McGwire. He is a wrinkled, 67-year-old non-fan named Rupert Murdoch. And it’s painfully clear that the ruthless Australian media magnate means to swing the huge bat just put into his hands more like…
We should be thankful, I suppose, for the headlong assault by assorted filmmakers upon the dark castle of Great Literature. For one thing, it reduces the need for college students to squander their hard-earned beer money on Cliffs Notes. It also reminds patrons in the sports bars that iambic pentameter…
Takeshi Kitano, the reigning Renaissance man of Japanese pop culture, is a scriptwriter, movie actor and director, as well as the star of seven TV shows. He produces six different columns for national magazines and, it says here, has written 55 books. In his spare time, he makes outrageous public…
While the furniture-smashers of the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey Team were returning to vain millionairehood in the NHL, and Latrell Sprewell was explaining to his adoring public that the really important lesson in the strangling of P.J. Carlesimo is the one that coaches should learn from it, and Chicago Bear…
Richard Kwietniowski’s first feature, Love and Death on Long Island, won’t be every surfer babe’s idea of a good time. But if you’ve got a taste for mordant wit, sharp observation and a whiff of personal liberation, step up and grab a ticket for this quirky, wonderfully surreal tale about…
While Kate Winslet was having her diaper changed and Keanu Reeves was sneaking a joint into the prom, an extraordinary thing happened. A cast of actors who have nineteen Academy Award nominations (and five Oscars) to their credit and one of the most accomplished directors in America were making a…
Maybe Lawrence Eugene Doby was destined to be overshadowed. In the course of his thirteen-year major-league career, he batted .283, hit 253 home runs and led the American League in homers in 1952 and 1954. But because he played in the golden era of Mantle, Mays and Snider, Larry Doby’s…
It won’t be easy for Joel and Ethan Coen to top Fargo anytime soon, because it was the culmination and pinnacle of a personal style they had been refining for years. The small-time greed, hilariously bungled deceptions and startling violence they brought to their tale of kidnapping-gone-wrong in icy Minnesota…
At first glance, Jonathan Darby’s Hush appears to have a couple of things going for it. There’s some high-wattage star power in the persons of Jessica Lange and Emma’s Gwyneth Paltrow. There’s a possibly lethal power struggle between a possessive mother and the pretty daughter-in-law who’s snatched her sonny boy…
