If the goofballs in Hollywood want to pay Demi Moore 12 million bucks to waggle her butt and flash her chest at a movie camera, so be it. That doesn’t mean we have to reimburse them. Striptease contains two or three minutes of softcore T and A, and that is…
The so-called phenomenon in Phenomenon first shows itself when a likable but dim-witted auto mechanic played by John Travolta suddenly starts beating brainy Robert Duvall at chess. A little while later, the ex-dumbbell learns Portuguese in twenty minutes, just in time to save a lost boy’s life. He cleverly engineers…
When they asked Ozzie Smith last week about the best plays of his career, it was a little like having Picasso pick out a couple of favorite pictures. Where do you start? Still, the slickest-fielding shortstop in the history of the game obliged his questioners. * On April 20, 1978,…
The Germans are not exactly the kings of comedy–not in this century–so it’s always a little startling to come across a German film speckled with yuks, even when those yuks are largely about dissolution and death. Case in point: Doris Dorrie’s Nobody Loves Me is a kind of bedroom farce…
The young filmmaker Todd Solondz insists that the unsettling picture of preteen trauma he gives us in his astonishing Welcome to the Dollhouse is not autobiographical–even though Heather Matarazzo, the eleven-year-old actress he cast in the part of a lonely, terrorized seventh-grader, bears a striking physical resemblance to him, and…
In the age of MTV and the no-attention span, most Americans demand their spectator sports stuffed with flash, crash and bang–along with the occasional three-color dye job. Graying Cadillac owners still watch golf on the boob tube, but the silent beauty of man or woman gliding swiftly over a course…
If you decide to catch only one of this summer’s zillion-dollar action movies, make it The Rock. The high-profile Simpson/Bruckheimer production team, Bad Boys director Michael Bay and a battalion of stunt people blow up even more stuff–Humvees, yellow Ferraris, cable cars, a Navy weapons depot, some big chunks of…
Europe’s favorite movie comedian, Roberto Benigni, carries the Buster Keaton chromosome and the Jim Carrey chromosome–joined together in bedroom farce. American audiences know him best as Tom Waits’s talkative cellmate in Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law, as Johnny Stecchino, or as Inspector Clouseau Jr. in the ill-considered Son of the…
On June 24 the good people of Quebec will celebrate the feast of Saint Jean, commemorating the good works and the martyrdom of John the Baptist. Those conversant with the New Testament, or–failing that–who’ve seen a couple of Cecil B. DeMille movies, know that Jesus Christ began his public life…
For more than half a century, science-fiction movies have been asking if there’s intelligent life in outer space. The Arrival makes you wonder how much of it is left on Earth. Imagine Charlie Sheen as one Zane Zaminski, a goofy science nerd with a bad crewcut, fogged-up glasses and a…
If you want to get all star-struck, it’s probably a good idea to aim a little higher than the assorted frauds, mannequins, paralyzed junkies and ten-cent philosophers who drifted into Andy Warhol’s orbit in downtown New York in the late Sixties. At Max’s Kansas City in those days, the signature…
Jerry Storm, the Colorado Wildcats’ No. 1 fan, has been going to games for five years now, so he’s seen it all. He’s watched women get into fights in the stands. He saw the Cats’ Thomas Stubblefield rush for 2,000 yards in 1994. He once saw an opposing player belt…
Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell is being billed as Japan’s coming-out party in the world of big-time animation, as well as another visionary take on the future. But before cartoon freaks get too carried away, it might be useful to note that Oshii’s drawing style can be stiff, cold…
The silly season is upon us, so the best you can hope for down at the local multiplex these days is silliness with a touch of style, a dash of sense and an absence of tornadoes. Enter Dragonheart, which combines the romance of huge, toothsome beasts with the classic movie…
Wonder if Timothy McVeigh has one of those $240 Colorado Avalanche jerseys yet? Everyone else within fifty miles of McNichols Arena now wears one, and to hear people talk, they’ve all been dedicated hockey fans since the Eskimos made the first ice cube and Gordie Howe was in diapers. In…
Seen any good Icelandic movies lately? How about surreal Icelandic road movies that begin at a fish market in Tokyo and wind up with the principals eating roasted rams’ testicles in a raucous country-and-Western bar plunked down about nine yards from the North Pole? Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever is…
Good morning, Mr. Phelps…Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to play second fiddle to Tom Cruise, because he’s the star and the producer. And to inflate a pretty entertaining old TV series into a movie monster that cost more to make than all the broadcast episodes put…
Evidently, there are no limits on baseball’s current charms. Volatile Cleveland Indians outfielder Albert Belle, long a wrecker of locker rooms and teammates’ psyches, throws a baseball at a magazine photographer who has the temerity to take his picture, and American League president Gene Budig orders him to counseling. Self-absorbed…
Jim Jarmusch’s Old West is no place for John Wayne. Inspired by Native American pantheism, the English mystic poet William Blake and the heretofore unnoticed connection between the two, America’s most unpredictable filmmaker has come up with a dark, dreamy Western called Dead Man in which the “frontier” is not…
If you’re in the market for your very own Doppler radar set or a pickup truck with real cojones, Twister is a pretty good place to go shopping. Ostensibly, Jan De Bont’s big, loud, expensive action movie is about the destructive power of tornadoes and the folks who chase stormy…
Imagine the Colorado Springs Sky Sox and the Toledo Mud Hens in the World Series. Or a field of $15,000 claimers running for the roses at the Kentucky Derby. Or a pair of unknown club pros playing the final at Wimbledon. That’s what this year’s Indianapolis 500 is going to…
After a suspiciously long abstention, Hollywood has finally deemed the death penalty an Important Issue once again. But the two current movies on the subject reveal the huge gap between the best minds of the “entertainment industry” and its low-rent hucksters. The good news: While redneck double murderer Sean Penn…
