Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a niche as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films–Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)–combined humor with pathos to shed light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family conflicts. The news that he…
Family films are often pitched for “the child in us all,” but Bean doesn’t have an ounce of “inner child” in it. It’s been worked out to appeal to, at best, 8-to-10-year-olds; there’s not much to delight even precocious preteens, let alone adults. This really is too bad, since Rowan…
In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’ supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter (Dustin…
Three Halloweens ago, Tempe’s Valley Art Theatre hosted a screening of Universal’s 1925 horror classic The Phantom of the Opera, with live-organ accompaniment. On the night before Halloween this year, the admirable experiment is being repeated on a grander scale. Organist Rob Richards, who played the Valley Art show on…
Despite Red Corner’s muckraking pretensions, it is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. Popping out like jack-o’-lanterns in the discotheque’s low light, they have the look of trashy royalty–exalted and…
The true-life story of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the incident has suddenly appeared (on its 80th anniversary) as the basis for two films simultaneously. Photographing Fairies, with…
In The Myth of Fingerprints, middle-class white people gather at their parents’ home for Thanksgiving, lovers in tow, to snipe at one another and bellyache about how horrible home life used to be. This description would also cover Home for the Holidays of two years ago. Myth’s people are a…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
What a relief it is to see a movie like James Dean: Race With Destiny. It had begun to feel as if the bad movie were dead–not gone, of course; as long as there are movies, most of them will be crummy. But in recent years, movie badness has been…
On the wintry Sabbath referred to by the title of Jonathan Nossiter’s Sunday, a middle-aged homeless man wanders the streets of Queens. Nothing new there. His name is Oliver (David Suchet), and he used to be a married, white-collar company man with IBM, but now he’s divorced, alone, sleeping in…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all–rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion during the course…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days at the Movies. It refuses to come to life–not even when prodded by Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wandering the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…
The first scene of Different for Girls is both lyrical and chilling–a teenage boy (Stephen Walker) showers in a school locker room, posed like a Raphaelite statue, with his genitals tucked out of sight. Classmates, fully clothed, approach him through the steam and begin to harass him, until another boy…
By its very definition, a thriller should, you know, thrill. It should not only scare its audience with a quick jolt, that sudden noise in the dark that comes from nowhere and fills everywhere, but with its slow burn. It’s not enough for a thriller to tell its story, to…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the conspiracy dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through her new film, The Matchmaker, with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdog persona. Try though it may to cast “America’s favorite antistar” in a “romantic comedy for people who don’t like romantic comedy,” this script, a wholesale retread of Local Hero (which,…
Everybody likes to run down Canadian movies, but Canadian film festivals–I speak of Montreal and Toronto–are something else again. How can a country turn out such mediocre movies and such terrific film festivals? In Hollywood, at least, we’re consistent: Our movies and our film festivals are equally lousy. I started…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…
There’s a lovely formality to the structure of the comedy Wedding Bell Blues. Three young women (Paulina Porizkova, Illeana Douglas and Julie Warner), roomies, take a road trip to Vegas, with the vague plan of getting married, then immediately divorced. Their notion is that a 30ish divorcee is less pathetic…
Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…
