MIAMI (October 3, 1997)–Say it loud, South Florida. The Marlins are going to the World Series. Playoff veteran Bobby Bonilla blasted a three-run homer off Mark Wohlers in the seventh inning at Joe Robbie Stadium last night, breaking a 2-2 deadlock with the favored Atlanta Braves. The Marlins went on…
The spookiness that has seeped into first-time director Vondie Curtis Hall’s surreal action comedy Gridlock’d is the kind of dramatic bonus no moviemaker hopes for. It derives from the gang murder last September of the film’s 25-year-old co-star, Tupac Shakur, and it colors the entire length of this dark farce…
Andre Techine’s Les Voleurs (Thieves) is stuffed with sex, blood and grand-theft auto, and at its heart lurks a homicide detective who’s deeply compromised himself in the investigation of a big case. But before anyone gets the wrong idea, please note that neither Clint Eastwood nor Arnold Schwarzenegger got within…
Every time the University of Colorado men’s basketball team hosts the University of Kansas two hours before kickoff in the Super Bowl, you can count on an audience of, say, dozens. Street-corner preachers in sub-zero weather draw bigger crowds. So do doctors advertising specials on pre-frontal lobotomies. More Boulderites are…
Eight years after A Fish Called Wanda rang up $200 million at the box office and won an Oscar for its manic villain, Kevin Kline, the cast has reunited in hopes of putting another dark charge into movie comedy. Fierce Creatures is not a sequel but a major departure, and…
If the brutal miscarriage of British justice that drove In the Name of the Father didn’t send you running to the nearest Sinn Fein recruiter and the fiery romanticism of Michael Collins didn’t have you putting together a tidy shipment of machine guns for the Provisionals in Belfast, maybe Some…
You can take two million dollars out of Dennis Rodman’s checking account. While you’re at it, go ahead and set it on fire. With his endorsements, he’s paid seven times that. Every season. You can also take him off the floor and sit his crazy ass on the bench. Not…
Let’s give Kenneth Branagh credit, shall we, for the breadth of his good sense. At 35, this Irish prodigy is the foremost cinematic interpreter of Shakespeare in a time when everyone just short of Jackie Chan and Jim Carrey seems to be cooking up a new movie version of Macbeth…
Just when you think Eddie Murphy has pulled off a glorious comeback, he slips up on the banana peel of ego. To wit: Not six months ago, Murphy burst back to the top with his energetic takes on seven different characters–fat, skinny and uniformly hilarious–in the sleeper of 1996, The…
If they look hard enough, Green Bay fans will be able to find bratwurst in New Orleans. When it comes to fulfilling desire, you can find anything in New Orleans. Of course, the Wisconsin snowfolk might do better to sample the piquant local sausage called andouille, which Cajun/Creole chefs put…
It may come as a surprise to some that leukemia, senility and bitterness between parent and child are the stuff of comedy. But therein lies the unlikely miracle of Marvin’s Room, a compelling drama about a shattered family trying to pick up the pieces that draws much of its strength…
When the British critic John Russell Taylor called the Hollywood musical “a city built to music,” he was thinking more of Fred Astaire’s work than of Woody Allen’s. But anyone who remembers how Allen swaddled that beautiful opening montage of Manhattan in “Rhapsody in Blue” knows that when it comes…
Let’s hope Daffy Duck buys the Los Angeles Dodgers. Or Boris Yeltsin. If the Bosnian government puts together an ownership group, writes a check for 300 million bucks and moves the team to burned-out Sarajevo, that will be fine. Maybe Madonna is interested. For all that it matters, she can…
In an ideal world, Ghosts of Mississippi would be about how the widow of Medgar Evers and the people of Mississippi finally got justice thirty years after the civil rights leader’s assassination. But Hollywood is not an ideal world–never has been–so Rob Reiner’s well-meaning, hand-wringing movie is really about the…
Even the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment must reach pretty far down into their belief to come up with Larry Flynt as a poster boy. An unschooled Kentucky hillbilly with a big mouth and a gift for manipulation, he stuffed Hustler magazine, a phenomenon of the Seventies, full of…
Whooooops! Afterward, Lionel Washington couldn’t hold back the tears. A devastated Shannon Sharpe wondered aloud if he’d be able to look at himself in the mirror come Sunday morning. Or face John Elway. Sharpe predicted it would be “years until the Broncos get over this loss. Probably the next century.”…
Best Ten of 1996 1. Big Night. Art vs. commerce, sibling rivalry and great Italian food at the Jersey shore in the Fifties. 2. Fargo. Yah, hon. Murder meets mirth in the frozen nort’ country, courtesy of the Coen brothers. 3. Secrets & Lies. Britain’s Mike Leigh examines a shattered…
After playing a lovable gangster who becomes an instant Hollywood celebrity (in Get Shorty) and a lovable auto mechanic who becomes an instant genius (in Phenomenon), John Travolta has landed a gig as, well, the Archangel Michael–a visitor from the heavens who becomes instant salvation for three burned-out mortals stuck…
The schizophrenic concert pianist in Scott Hicks’s Shine combines all the qualities that makers of a “major motion picture” about a tormented artist are looking for. Young David is brilliant, of course, but his ruthless backstage father pounds him into a puddle of nerves. When his mind finally snaps and…
Above all, 1996 was the year Denver wore the Scarlet Letter–that big red “A” at once symbolizing the city’s first professional sports championship and its shameless dalliance with the new kid in town. All hail immediate gratification: Marc Crawford’s beautifully coached, deeply talented Colorado Avalanche had scarcely forgotten the taste…
In the 43 years since The Crucible first saw a footlight, Arthur Miller has steadfastly maintained that his dramatic condemnation of the Salem witch trials was really a veiled outcry against Senator Joseph McCarthy and the political terrorism of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Almost no one’s argued with him…
Michael Hoffman’s One Fine Day is a fantasy about family values with an awful case of high blood pressure. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer as a man-weary single mom and E.R. idol George Clooney as a woman-weary single dad who have kids enrolled at the same school, it spends one frantic weekday…
