Ever since the semi-mystical Swedish writer Selma Lagerlsf won the 1909 Nobel Prize for Literature, a rumor’s been going around that the fix was in. The Swedish Academy, detractors say, had favored a native daughter who made her only real contribution to world culture in 1924–when she inadvertently launched Greta…
On the bulletin board outside the Rockies’ clubhouse, some wit had posted a newspaper photo of Marshall Herff Applewhite, the late, lamented guru of the Heaven’s Gate cult–he of the astonished eyes. It’s astonishing, all right. As of Wednesday morning, seven games into the season, the Rox had won five…
This must be the year for nonsensical movies involving automobiles, violence, confused identities and sex, directed by guys named Dave. No sooner has David Lynch led his disciples off on a wild-goose chase called Lost Highway, in which the main character morphs into somebody else, than David Cronenberg pops up…
Smilla’s Sense of Snow feels like two movies. The first of them addresses the animating drama of the original Peter Hoeg novel–the quest of its young scientist/heroine, who is Greenlandic Inuit on her mother’s side and Danish on her father’s, to break out of cultural exile in Copenhagen and reclaim…
It has been years now since the morning I woke up older than every player in the major leagues. What to do. What else? I poured myself a quadruple Scotch, drank it in my bathrobe and got on the hook to the parish priest. “Spare a minute today, Father? I’d…
You know you’re in neo-noir country when the first images on the screen turn out to be empty freeway ramps bathed in cold moonlight and oil-cracking towers looming in the fog. It’s as though Michelangelo Antonioni and Nicholas Ray had both been let loose again in Los Angeles to spread…
The young black Chicagoans in Theodore Witcher’s love jones are busy finding themselves–in writing or photography, on the winding paths of friendship, in the mysteries of life and career that loom ahead. Most of all, they’re trying to figure out the real deal on romantic love, but the ambiguities of…
For almost three decades, if you heard that the men’s basketball coach at the University of Colorado was going to hang around for another year, it was like learning that Captain Smith was still the skipper of the Titanic. In Boulder, basketball was a minor annoyance wedged between football season…
The Indian-born director Mira Nair has never hesitated to cross borders–cultural, geographical or temporal. Some of her previous films have examined aging dancers in a Bombay strip club, an expatriate newspaper vendor in New York who’s been separated from his pregnant wife in India, the Romeo-and-Juliet romance of a black…
The backwaters of our great republic are probably no more infested than the cities with photographers whose pictures are pure accident, novelists in need of remedial English or actors chugging along on grand illusions of adequacy. Indeed, every busboy and skateboarder in Los Angeles is waiting for a callback from…
Bill Clinton, the new night clerk at Motel 6, decreed last week that for the foreseeable future, not one federal nickel will be spent on human cloning research. And he asked privately funded geneticists to voluntarily stop such tinkering down in the lab. What can the man be thinking? Just…
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight aspires to be gritty and tough and tender all at once, but its tones keep getting in one another’s way. In his feature-film debut, Anderson has conjured up the tale of a courtly old gambler, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), who inexplicably takes under his wing…
Moviegoers who believe that David “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Lynch is the greatest genius to hit the big screen since Dali and Bunuel slit that poor donkey’s eyeball in Un Chien Andalou are going to get a serious kick out of Lost Highway–and probably spend a couple of hours afterward…
If the lords of baseball really want to clean up the awful mess they’ve made, they probably won’t be asking stormy Albert Belle to double as the game’s official spokesman. Mark McGwire, either. A huge slab of muscle who’s proven as fragile as a china figurine, McGwire has turned into…
It has taken 22 years to release When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s documentary about the tumultuous October 1974 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, because the filmmaker’s original backers kept running into bad luck. One of them died in a plane crash; another was shot by a Liberian…
The vision of race war that Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton conjures up in Rosewood comes at a precarious moment in our national history. Polarized reactions to the O.J. Simpson verdicts have demonstrated how deep the rift between black and white remains–forty years after the civil-rights movement hit…
That hint of springtime you feel in the air can mean only one thing. The attention of red-blooded sports fans in these parts will soon turn to the fluid dynamics of air flow, plausible stress-strain cycles at fixed impact velocities and (everybody’s favorite up in the Rockpile) the Navier-Stokes Equation…
Billy Bob Thornton isn’t going to snatch the matinee-idol title away from Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner or Denzel Washington anytime soon. At the age of 41, the former Hearts Afire regular is also a grizzled acting veteran of low-rent slasher flicks like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and modest critical successes…
The second most important room in their houses is the boudoir, so the sophisticated French are good at sex farce. If anything, the warm-blooded Italians are even better. The occasional American moviemaker–Billy Wilder, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen–can turn the trick, too, wedding absurdity to desire and coming up with dark…
He doesn’t remember much from that night at the Bossert Hotel, except that someone kept refilling his glass with champagne, and he could see from the windows that the whole length of Montague Street was clogged with delirious people. “We had to take turns going outside and waving to them,”…
Since Baby LeRoy first put the screws to W.C. Fields back in the 1930s, the intractable child who torments the cranky old man has rampaged through movie history like a wild force of nature. The most celebrated recent example, of course, saw little Macaulay Culkin befouling the burglary schemes of…
For generations, the heftier works of Leo Tolstoy have challenged undergraduate lifting power and speed-reading skills as much as they have confounded the world’s moviemakers. That dark tribute to nineteenth-century adultery, Anna Karenina, was filmed in America three times, beginning with Garbo in 1935 and ending with Jacqueline Bisset in…
