Lest we imagine that the publishing industry went to hell only after James Frey and J.T. Leroy clambered on board, here comes Lasse Hallström to remind us of a literary dustup emblematic of a much earlier nadir for American mendacity. The Hoax parses the rise and fall of faker Clifford…
Nothing is too crazed, corny or freakishly florid for Tears of the Black Tiger. The debut of writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng is a delightfully unembarrassed affair; conceived in such good, giddy spirits, it might have been called Blissfully Yours. A flamboyantly kitschy mélange of genre anachronisms and new-school ‘tude, this super-duper…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Twin Peaks: The Second Season (Paramount) So, here it is: perhaps the most infamous shark-jumping in TV history. The first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s comedy-horror-mystery-soap opera caused a cultural frenzy of “damn good coffee” quips and questions over who murdered prom queen/town doorknob Laura Palmer. It’s also…
Hard-core phantasie geeks will relish role-playing every enemy of The Last Mimzy, a family-style sci-fi adventure whose director, Bob Shaye, is better known to them as the evil wizard — the alien executive who peed all over the Fellowship. Shaye, in his other job as New Line Cinema topper, has…
At various times over the last decade, David Fincher, Sam Mendes and Michael Mann were attached to direct Scott Frank’s screenplay for The Lookout, about a brain-damaged high-school hockey stud who’s smooth-talked by distant acquaintances into robbing a small-town bank. That Frank — best known for straightening and sharpening the…
Children of Men (Universal) Set in a tomorrow that looks like yesterday, Alfonso Cuarón’s wrenching adaptation of P.D. James’ novel feels more like documentary than fiction. In the movie’s world, women have gone barren, and immigrants are tossed into prison camps; it’s the proverbial nightmare to which we might actually…
In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign Over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he’s a…
As Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife and three young daughters in one of the September 11 plane crashes, Adam Sandler sports a mass of bedraggled locks and walks with his head hung low, the sounds of the city drowned out by the Who or Bruce…
Hard-core phantasie geeks will relish role-playing every enemy of The Last Mimzy, a family-style sci-fi adventure whose director, Bob Shaye, is better known to them as the evil wizard — the alien executive who peed all over the Fellowship. Shaye, in his other job as New Line Cinema topper, has…
Led by a short, rotund man who carries a briefcase and speaks as if conserving his last reserves of emotion, the heroes of Army of Shadows engage in little of what counts for action these days. And yet, as directed by WWII veteran and gangster-movie master Jean-Pierre Melville, this long-unreleased…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Blood Diamond (Warner Bros.) Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond, about the civil war over diamonds that devastated Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, plays like a guilt-ridden Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It’s little more than action-adventure pulp drenched in someone else’s blood — which it tries to wash off by proselytizing to…
The space-time continuum smacks the shit out of Sandra Bullock in Premonition, the latest in non-linear nonsense, but the fun really gets going when she starts to smack back. As Linda Hanson, humdrum mom of Anywhere, USA, Bullock sets things up by doing her thing, effortlessly establishing the girl next…
Packed with female book club members, a screening of Mira Nair’s The Namesake left no doubt about the film’s target audience. If anyone’s going to flock to this warm and likable tale, it’s going to be women, yet it seems a pity to confine the movie behind the bars of…
It is November 7, election day in America, the year of our Lord 2000, and en route to the ballot (screen, chad dimpler, whatever), every hand miraculously freezes in mid-selection. All at once, there is a lightning-fast stroboscopic blip of the future: two planes, human rain, a shower of debris…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Casino Royale (Sony) James Bond gets a stirring shake-up in the best — yeah, Goldfinger fans, the best — film in the series’ 44-year history. Daniel Craig’s 007 has more going on above the neck and below the waist than even Sean Connery’s. He’s a genuinely compelling character — a…
Long ago, there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amid copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it that they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their…
I am sorry to say that Peter did not feel very well that evening. His mother put him to bed and gave him a dose of chamomile tea. ‘One tablespoon to be taken at bedtime.’ But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper. — Beatrix…
A dozen years ago, Kelly Reichardt made her feature debut with a wonderfully desultory, nearly avant-garde riff on the last romantic couple. Reichardt’s River of Grass was a comic, slacker Bonnie and Clyde, set on the edge of the Everglades. Her belated followup, the more elegiac but no less site-specific…
Gross-out horror is never far from comedy, and The Host, Bong Joon-ho’s giddy creature feature, has an anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old Mad magazines. A broadly played clown show full of lowbrow antics, Bong’s big splat is itself a sort of monster — the top-grossing movie…
