The title is 8 Seconds, which refers to the length of time a rodeo bull rider must remain on the bull’s back in order to qualify in the competition. It’s also approximately the length of time that this little movie is likely to linger in your memory after you’ve seen…
If you look closely at beautiful Dana Wynter in the climactic chase scenes near the end of director Don Siegel’s 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you can tell what she’s thinking: Oh, forget it, let’s just go to sleep and turn into aliens. She’s begun, you can…
Ben Stiller, who directed Reality Bites, also co-stars in it. He plays Michael, one point on a romantic triangle of Generation Xers (isn’t it amazing how quickly that term grew tiresome?). Michael is a well-to-do yupster, a producer for a vapid music-video network. Point number two is Troy (Ethan Hawke),…
John Guare’s acclaimed play Six Degrees of Separation would not, at first glance, seem like a very promising candidate for movie adaptation. It’s stagebound, not because it’s confined to one setting–it isn’t–but because of its presentational style. Much of the story is relayed directly to the audience by the actors…
The appeal of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ documentary The War Room is that it’s a buddy picture. The stars–and that’s how they’re presented, as stars rather than as documentary subjects–are James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, widely regarded as the true architects of Bill Clinton’s victory in the most recent…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Actors are notoriously willing to try anything, but even the most eager beaver might have done a double take at this audition notice: “One male actor with some musical ability and acting age range of 30 to 45, needed for a joint theatre/psychoneuroimmunology research project…Note: Small blood samples will be…
If the life of filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., were fiction, set down more or less as Wood’s cronies tell it, it would be hailed as the great Hollywood satire. It would seem like a creation of Nathaniel West, had he survived until the Fifties, or of Tom Robbins, had…
For those who have never sampled the weird delights of Ed Wood’s filmmaking, the auteur’s entire “legitimate” (that is, pre-porno) feature canon is available on video. Any of his movies are worth a look for connaisieurs of the bizarre, although only two–Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer…
