By subject, movies come in sets of three. In 1984, we had Places in the Heart, The River and Country; last year we had Highlander: The Final Dimension, Rob Roy and Braveheart; and I’m still wondering whatever happened to the third pig movie. Probably intended to capitalize on the loyal…
Aristotle was wrong, you know. In Poetics, his small book of dramatic criticism, he says that the action of a good tragedy elapses in a straightforward progression, without digression or counterpointing action, usually on the same day, in the same spot. More than two thousand years of theatrical practice and…
In June of 1968, a young, unpublished writer named Valerie Solanas assured herself a footnote in pop-culture history–a very brief footnote. She did this by shooting and nearly killing pop artist and party maven Andy Warhol, whom she had tried with little success to cultivate as a patron. As played…
Peter Graves, star of TV’s Mission: Impossible, who has since retired to stately voice-overs on the A&E network, is not the sort of actor one thinks of as an old master. Yet he might have shown Tom Cruise, the star of the current feature version of MI, a trick or…
“You talkin’ to me?” Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), title character of Taxi Driver, speaks this line to his own reflection in his fleabag apartment, while playing with his new guns. Martin Scorsese’s masterly 1976 film, now celebrating its 20th birthday with a rerelease at Valley Art Theatre, has no…
In the press book for Heaven’s Prisoners, director Phil Joanou boasts, “Sure, we have shoot-outs in mysterious swamps and across the rooftops. . . . But that’s only meant to spice up the meal. The main course is the characters.” This is true, alas. The spices in a meal–even a…
The African maxim that it takes a village to raise a child is the theme of Once Upon a Time . . . When We Were Colored. Clifton L. Taulbert’s slim book about his boyhood in the black section of a small Mississippi town in the 1950s is childhood memoir…
Barb Wire is the feature-film debut of Pamela Anderson Lee, that Jungian archetype of the buxom-blond bombshell who’s said to have been discovered at some public event on a Sony big screen–an electronic-age version of Lana Turner at the Schwab’s counter. The Baywatch star plays the title role in this…
It may give some indication of the glamorous life of a movie reviewer if I tell you that one of my favorite pastimes is, and has been since high school, watching Z-grade sci-fi, horror and other sorts of exploitation movies. Watching them by oneself is fun; watching them with like-minded…
Although Phoenix-area bigwigs frequently claim that they’d like the Valley to become more of a player in the entertainment industry, the soil here has proved harsh and infertile when it comes to efforts to grow a serious film festival–the mark of most major show-biz towns. Funding here is sparse, sponsors…
Like Dead Man Walking, Last Dance is about a bond that forms between a death-row inmate and a concerned outsider. This time around, however, the genders are switched: The prisoner (Sharon Stone) is a woman and her visitor is a man (Rob Morrow). Proximity to the release of Dead Man…
The Hat Squad, a legendary quartet of LAPD robbery detectives during the ’50s, was the inspiration for Mulholland Falls, a period mystery vaguely in the Chinatown/Devil in a Blue Dress vein. In the first scene, the boys (Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Chris Penn and Michael Madsen) throw a new-in-town gangster…
The Last Supper is about liberal rage, so, by nature, it’s a comedy. Directed by Stacy Title, the film takes off from a classic hypothetical parlor-game question: What if, as a time traveler, you met Hitler as a young man, innocent of his future crimes–do you murder him to prevent…
Roald Dahl was one of those writers–Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) another–who seem to have kept a direct line open between adulthood and the childhood id. Dahl’s 1961 children’s book James and the Giant Peach was about exactly that–a boy who uses a giant peach as an airship…
Nick Broomfield’s BBC documentary Heidi Fleiss Hollywood Madam runs well over two hours. Think about that for a minute. Compare it to other documentaries about prominent contemporary women–it’s much longer than the Maya Lin movie, and only a hair shorter than the one about Leni Riefenstahl. And perhaps what’s most…
If the uselessly titled new Richard Gere vehicle Primal Fear were a paperback novel bought in haste in an airport terminal, it would probably pass the time it takes to fly over the Midwest agreeably enough. Based on a William Diehl novel that has, no doubt, made that very trip…
Ira Levin succinctly defined the stage thriller as “the one-set, five-character moneymaker.” That’s the basic design of Faithful, Paul Mazursky’s film of Chazz Palminteri’s play, adapted for the screen by and co-starring the author. Apart from a few expendable bit players, there are five characters and, except for a few…
At the end of Sgt. Bilko, there’s a gag title thanking the U.S. Army “for its total lack of cooperation” in the making of the film. Presumably, the Army felt it couldn’t very well officially sanction a movie in which the hero was a gleeful, unrepentantly corrupt master sergeant who…
A Coen brothers movie wouldn’t be a Coen brothers movie if it didn’t take a snide view of its characters, and the oddball filmmaking team’s latest, Fargo, is no exception. The lads dearly love a protagonist they can humiliate, and the contempt they show for Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy)…
The intense need of so many adopted children to connect with their biological families can be puzzling to those of us not in their shoes. Reengaging with the people who gave you up as a baby has the potential to damage one’s link with the people who then took you…
In Two Much, Antonio Banderas plays a financially strapped rascal of a Miami art gallery owner who poses as twin brothers–one brainy, one a smooth operator–in order to romance two rich, gorgeous sisters (Daryl Hannah and Melanie Griffith). His character’s name is “Arturo Dodge,” which may give you an idea…
If you’re planning to see Executive Decision, you may wish to stop reading this for now, as I’m going to reveal a significant plot development within the next couple of paragraphs. I don’t do this to spoil anyone’s fun–I don’t think it will–but because I think the twist isn’t a…
