If you’ve never been to Atlanta, Georgia, in July, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s like walking around in a huge kettle of boiling soup with your ski clothes on. Then the sun comes up. In case you haven’t heard, they’re going to stage the Summer Olympic Games in…
Kenneth Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale is another sweet comic valentine to those batty but lovable show folk. So if you’re less than enthralled by the vanities and insecurities of actors, you may as well stop reading this and start shopping for another movie. Now that half the house has departed,…
When it comes to portraying the TV news biz, Hollywood is naturally drawn more to the glitz than the grit. Why make a big deal out of a fatal prison riot when you can have Robert Redford massage Michelle Pfeiffer’s foot? Who gives a damn about Latin American politics when…
Hey, Pat. Pat Bowlen. Why not save yourself some trouble? Before the bunco squad picks you up for extortion on this stadium thing, take some advice, willya? You’re not the only game in town anymore, fella, and there are quite a few of us who won’t give a rat’s eyeball…
Have Messrs. Ivory and Merchant shown you into one too many drawing rooms? Just about had it with the Jane Austen craze? Up to here with Victorian-class warfare? How about the eternal feud between manners and desire? That’s okay. A lot of people feel the same way. But before you…
French director Barbet Schroeder’s fifth American film, Before and After, strains to say something important about families–what binds them together, what tears them apart–in an age of moral ambiguity. In a more oblique way, this was also the subject of Martin Scorsese’s harrowing remake of the classic thriller Cape Fear,…
Charles O. Finley’s Oakland A’s once took a vote on the team plane to determine whether they would throw their boss out the emergency door. He was spared, one of the resident physicists later reported, out of fear that the cabin might depressurize and disturb the players’ card games. At…
Assorted Hollywood hotshots are still going downhill fast in Aspen and Telluride, but for the most part they regard Denver as fly-over country. So when the Mile High City shows up in a movie–even a movie as scummy as Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead–it’s a good bet…
My favorite public official, the profoundly corrupt James J. Walker, is said to have spent all his waking hours between 1926 and 1932 lolling in a first-base box at Yankee Stadium, visiting his tailor, brokering crooked deals in speakeasies and throwing dice in a back room at the old Central…
On a good night in south Florida you can still catch pieces of games from all over the island–from Santa Clara and Havana and Pinar del Ro and Cienfuegos, which is home to the Elephants. The late innings breeze northward over the waves via Rebel Radio. Even if your Spanish…
To call John Woo a loose cannon is to understate the case. The former star director of the bloody, flamboyant, no-holds-barred Hong Kong cinema is a blazing wall of machine-gun fire and two halves of a severed freight train smashing together. Woo is helicopters bursting into balls of flame, fighter…
China’s great filmmaker Zhang Yimou has never gotten along with his country’s ruthless government, and his stock recently dropped with his longtime leading lady, the ravishing Gong Li. But Zhang is absolutely dedicated to his art: Shanghai Triad is another astonishingly beautiful film in a line that includes Red Sorghum,…
Not many baseball fans have heard of George Bone, but that’s no surprise. In 1901 George played twelve games at shortstop for last-place Milwaukee, hit a very respectable .302 and promptly dropped off the face of the earth–or went back to New Haven. So there’s not much reason to remember…
If John Grisham wanted to sue the makers of The Juror for impersonation of a legal thriller, he’d have a pretty good case. Some might see the star combo of Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin as a Dream Team, but the movie is strictly lightweight stuff, and unintentionally dense to…
Historians tell us that King Richard III’s reputation as England’s most ruthless monarch is a bit inflated. In all likelihood, he wasn’t even the original Tricky Dick: A century earlier, after all, Richard II murdered one of his uncles and confiscated his cousin’s estates before getting himself imprisoned in Pontefract…
He looked like a beer truck rumbling down the floor at the Fabulous Forum, and by the fourth quarter he was out of gas. But Magic Johnson returned gloriously last week to the game that once cast him out, and the effects are bound to be wide-ranging. At least they…
The shenanigans of Charles, Di and Fergie may intrigue the tabloid-TV crowd, but the present British royals are simply no match for their misbehaving forebears. You don’t even need to crack a history book to see the difference: Filmmakers have recently given us satisfying new interpretations of George III’s lunacy…
Now comes 25-year-old Noah Baumbach to say his comic piece for the generation that disdains the label “X.” As a spokesman–at least for the affluent, white, college-grad segment of the group–his credentials are all in order: Recent degree from upscale Vassar (yes, they’ve had boys there for years), fashionably hip…
While all American eyes were on Tempe, Arizona, and the Super Bowl last weekend, Monica Seles swept through the field at the Australian Open tennis tournament to win her ninth career Grand Slam title. In beating Anke Huber 6-4, 6-1, Seles extended her Australian Open match record to a perfect…
God knows that American schools need inspirational teachers and that the funding cuts that threaten arts education everywhere are lamentable. But when Hollywood third-stringers get their hands on such material, the results are doomed to flunk the test. Mr. Holland’s Opus, in which Richard Dreyfuss portrays a budding composer who…
If there’s a less popular cause in the land of three-strikes-and-you’re-out justice than abolition of the death penalty, I don’t know what it is. Maybe a salary increase for Deion Sanders. Or amnesty for Saddam Hussein. The current occupant of the White House, cops sipping coffee down at the station…
Folks in blue-collar western Pennsylvania have loved football since Joe Namath weighed nine pounds and had both kneecaps. But they don’t have their heads in the clouds about it. Truth be told, there probably aren’t three Pittsburgh Steelers fans in ten who actually believe their club can upset the cocky,…
