The eagerness and all-out urgency driving John Singleton’s movies often overwhelm his common sense, but no one can fault the young filmmaker for lack of feeling or purpose. In Boyz N the Hood, Singleton threw himself into the streets of Los Angeles with both philosophical barrels blazing, and by the…
Susan Sarandon’s advisors shook their heads. Once you play a mother, they said, you’re stuck with mothers. You can’t go back. You can never outwit Tommy Lee Jones in court again. You can’t romance Kevin Costner in the bush leagues. You can’t rob convenience stores with Geena Davis. “That’s what…
Now that Cap’n Newt is steering the ship of state, how long will it take First Mate Helms to toss Pulp Fiction overboard and throw The Simpsons in the brig? While we wait for a little neo-Puritan backlash, here’s a safe, literate and, in places, self-righteous movie about the endurance…
Ludwig van Beethoven’s sundry biographers, wherever they’re sitting, may feel like throwing their hands over their eyes upon being subjected to the crass speculations in Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved. But they won’t cover their ears. Musical fidelity has always been more vital to composer biopics than historical accuracy, and Britisher…
How’s this for high concept? Hip, dreamy black dude from the Pittsburgh ‘hood evades loan sharks by passing himself off as square suburban businessman’s long-lost childhood buddy. Despite cultural clashes and comic missteps at the country club, impostor and entire dysfunctional family of white folks wind up friends. Bingo. Ring…
BEST TEN OF 1994 1. Pulp Fiction. Boy wonder Tarantino scores again with wickedly clever crime triptych. Travolta comeback in full swing. 2. Blue, White and Red. Polish master Kieslowski hits the trifecta, then announces retirement. 3. Cobb. Denver must wait for Tommy Lee JonesÕs brilliant portrait of savage, embittered…
The last time I checked, Albert Einstein was better known as the most brilliant theoretical physicist in human history than as a cute old prankster with white hair whose corduroys were always slipping over his butt. But then, I could be wrong. My SAT scores were lukewarm, I went to…
Out there in the forest primeval of moviedom, the “wild child” has long lurked, rustling around in search of edible tree bark and good box office. First Tarzan swung through the underbrush. Then Francois Truffaut discovered uncivilized, unspoiled Homo sapiens in 1969’s L’Enfant Sauvage. Werner Herzog rounded him up again…
In the Age of Jackie Collins, Anton Chekhov is not the first name that springs to mind when the prof starts talking lit. The Schwarzenegger crowd hasn’t read Chekhov in years, and no one pays 65 bucks a ticket anymore to see his stuff on Broadway. Thank goodness, then, for…
For seventy years Dorothy Parker’s adherents have been calling her “the first modern American woman” or “the wittiest writer of her time” or something equally absolute. Valued for her sardonic commentaries on failed love, suicide, heavy drinking and the bad plays she was forced to review, she is held up…
“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.” Yes, Dorothy Parker said that, too. She also said, “Let’s go wild–there’s plenty of time to do nothing once you’re dead.” And she summed up a Katharine Hepburn performance with this famous jape: “The whole range of emotion, from A to…
Before the cameras even started rolling on Ready to Wear (formerly Pret-a-Porter), Robert Altman’s mordant sendup of the fashion industry, the filmmaker had offended delicate sensibilities from New York to Paris and beyond. John Fairchild, editorial director of Women’s Wear Daily, has led a massive preemptive strike against Altman in…
The title says it all. The makers of Dumb and Dumber won’t win a genius grant anytime soon, but as long as you have a taste for the flipped-out antics of Jim Carrey and don’t mind juvenile bathroom humor, it ain’t a bad way to kill two hours. Especially if…
For some reason, beautiful wackos just can’t keep their hands off Michael Douglas. Glenn Close made him pay dearly for infidelity in Fatal Attraction, then scheming Sharon Stone did that police-station number on him in Basic Instinct. Now it’s Demi Moore’s turn at bat, and Kirk Douglas’s baby boy winds…
Robert King, it says right here, in 1989 began to write a screenplay about love at first sight between political junkies from opposite camps. Hurrah for him. Without the unlikely, unseemly romance of Clinton spin doctor James Carville and his opposite number from the ’92 Bush staff, Mary Matalin, however,…
Gary Busey is six years old. That’s how long it’s been since the blond Texan star of Under Siege and Lethal Weapon dumped his Harley-Davidson at 45 miles an hour, whacked his head on the pavement and…died. “I left my body,” he says, speaking very fast. “I was looking through…
The relationship between great film directors and their actors can be perfunctory–Alfred Hitchcock showed open contempt for the succession of cool blonds ensnared in his thrillers, and entire casts quaked before the imperiousness of Erich Von Stroheim. But when kindred souls meet on the set, the bond can be mystical,…
Red is the final chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s riveting “Three Colors Trilogy,” and if we can believe him, it’s also his swan song. But even if the Polish director of such art-house hits as The Double Life of Veronique and Red’s predecessors, Blue and White, doesn’t actually retire in his…
The fevers of adolescence have fascinated moviemakers since Griffith discovered the Gish sisters, but the results have grown more predictable by the decade. Ruled even more strictly by fad and formula than other commercial genres, most Hollywood teen movies are dominated by raunchy schoolboy humor, sweet nostalgia for the verge…
Unless you want to feel dull and laughless over the holidays, beware the latest outbreak of Chevy Chase Syndrome. Trapped in Paradise purports to be a comedy about three small-time, big-city crooks stuck in a cutesy-poo hick town at Christmastime. But there’s never been much funny in the spectacle of…
This is how Captain James Tiberius Kirk dies: He jumps across a broken bridge to retrieve a device whose function is too complicated, and frankly, too unimportant, to describe in any detail. The bridge gives way, and he falls into a ravine. Yes, Captain Kirk–the man who cheated death a…
The third and fourth generations of “magical realist” writers and moviemakers may have strayed from the path lit long ago by Borges, Garcia Marquez and Bunuel, but there’s still a bizarre metaphor or two lurking out there in the darkness of Latin America. Witness I Don’t Want to Talk About…
