Beyond the Gainesville city limits, cocky Steve Spurrier may be the least popular head coach in big-time college football. But even those who’d like to see the man vanish in the Everglades may have sympathized last January when his high-octane Florida Gators were blown out of the Fiesta Bowl, 62-24…
If you’re wondering what Travis Bickle has been up to for the last twenty years, here’s the answer. He’s changed his name to Gil Renard, taken a job selling big hunting knives out in San Francisco and become the baseball fan to end all killer baseball fans. Or so it…
Is it a trend or just an accident? In any event, the old Andy Warhol crowd has inspired two films this year, and you can envision a time when they’ll wind up on a double bill in what’s left of the revival houses. For now, the more interesting of the…
When Andre Dawson announced his retirement last week, a couple of astonished doctors pointed out that the great slugger had undergone twelve knee surgeries in his 21-year career–seven on the right knee, five on the left. Both ravaged knees, the Hawk allowed, are now creaking along “bone on bone.” That’s…
Kansas City, Robert Altman’s moody valentine to his hometown, unfolds on the eve of an election in 1934, when Boss Tom Pendergast was setting new standards for public corruption in the Midwest, the fleshpots were thriving, and the wide-open city’s famous jazz life was in full swing in the smoky…
In Tin Cup, Kevin Costner swaps his swim fins for a three-wood and hits one down the middle of the fairway. Costner has, I think, always come off better playing ordinary guys–the aging bush-leaguer of Bull Durham, the farmer who reconciles with his father’s ghost in Field of Dreams–than stainless-steel…
Now that Amy Van Dyken’s gold-medal perkiness is finally subsiding and your Colorado Rockies are on a road trip to respect, let’s turn our attention for a moment to the game with the big helmets. The National Football League pre-season is two weeks old, and on September 1–the same date…
The genteel pleasures of Jane Austen have recently become a familiar commodity to American moviegoers–even if quite a few of them are, like, unaware of it. To wit: The sublime English novelist’s comedy of manners Emma, published in 1816, was the inspiration for last year’s teen smash Clueless, in which…
By all accounts, Francis Ford Coppola is putting some pretty good wine into the bottle at his vineyard in Napa. Let’s hope so. Because the filmmaking career of one of America’s great directors has now hit the bottom of the barrel, and his future may lie entirely in viniculture. In…
While assorted waterbugs from Romania and Belarus and the suburbs of Cleveland bounded all over the mat and flung their tiny bodies back and forth between the uneven parallel bars, we had the whole thing explained to us on the boob tube by…John Tesh. Now it’s a good bet that…
The exhilarating paradoxes in the new Scottish drugs-and-destruction movie Trainspotting–fast becoming a hip hit on this side of the Atlantic, too–are that it takes as much pleasure in the depth of its nightmares as it does in the sting of its satire, and that its self-wasting junkies manage somehow to…
All right, then. Stay home. Seriously. Don’t even bother with the road games. Forfeit the damn road games. That way, you guys will save the club a couple of million bucks in airplane tickets, and you’ll always be able to have your eggs cooked the way you like them. You…
The good news about James Mangold’s Heavy, a gritty, small-budget first feature centering on a shy, fat mama’s boy whose life is wasting away in the kitchen of a dingy bar and grill in upstate New York, is that the place is completely free of space aliens, and Demi Moore…
John Grisham’s legal thrillers are the Big Macs of American publishing–more filler than meat and devoured in alarming numbers by consumers who are not interested in real nourishment. Then the books are dutifully recycled as Hollywood movies–because waste never really goes to waste in pop culture’s digestive tract. The former…
Look at it this way. The average American working stiff makes $548 a week–before taxes. Michael Jordan makes $576,923 a week–before the sneaker company and the cereal maker and the burger chain and the people who provide his underwear can even line up to add their huge endorsement checks to…
Between comeback kid Eddie Murphy’s lively new take on The Nutty Professor and the unintentional nonsensicality of the sci-fi megahit Independence Day, this has turned into a pretty good summer for movie yuks. For my money, though, the sharpest and funniest comedy of the silly season is Multiplicity, a breakneck…
In Edward Zwick’s Courage Under Fire, the age-old drama of soldiers doing battle gets a treatment-in-depth that is both overdue and welcome. Between the outright flag-wavers of the 1940s in which John Wayne single-handedly defeated the treacherous Japanese and the heart-of-darkness job Hollywood eventually did on the divisive Vietnam War,…
Horseplayers and fight guys are carried through life by the same sweet torrent of optimism. Damn the facts. Sheer belief will get you back to the cashier’s window. Force of will can win the title. In the meantime, keep talking. Talking keeps the demons of doubt at bay. At the…
In the realm of movies aimed at preteens, there is probably very little this discerning group won’t find dorky. An exception, I say with some trepidation, might be the long-overdue movie version of Harriet the Spy, which is a joint venture of Nickelodeon TV and Paramount Pictures. The late Louise…
The lean, windburned sheriff at the heart of John Sayles’s Lone Star descends directly from the classic lawmen of Hollywood’s Old West–quiet loners obsessed with raw justice and denied the comforts of home. But Sayles’s present-day creation, Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), has a slightly different bale of hay to burn…
If the sign of a dysfunctional family is the inability to agree about anything, then I suppose that’s what we were. Every time we went out to a ballpark. Of course, no one in a ballpark ever used the word “dysfunctional.” But there were a lot of other, more colorful…
Want to hear a recipe for competing in the summer movie marketplace? First, dig up $80 or $90 million. Add 3,000 (yes, 3,000) special-effects shots depicting stuff like the fiery destruction of the Empire State Building, the U.S. Capitol and the White House, a couple of major air battles between…
