Heavens Can Wait

A lot of ink has been shed in the press lately about the “seriousness” of the new Robert Zemeckis film Contact, starring Jodie Foster as an astronomer who receives humankind’s first extraterrestrial message. Forrest Gump made Zemeckis a guru; now he’s being primed as a philosopher king. Is it rude…

Stranger Danger

The special effects in the sci-fi comedy Men in Black are an orgy of animatronics, mechanical effects, practical effects, miniatures, computer enhancements, makeup–the whole shebang. The film’s mishmash of tones, from goofball to horrific, is equally all over the map. It has its cartoonish side, but it also has its…

Pride and Puberty

Several times during the kid movie Wild America, the three teen-heartthrob heroes cruise down the road to the strains of “Born to Be Wild.” Disgrace, you say, to put the Easy Rider anthem through one more commercial indignity–yuppie car ads in the ’80s, and now a pulse-raiser for the Tiger…

Bee Minus

To get into a good-lovin’ mood before each date, a college housemate of mine croaked along to Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” while blasting it through his stereo. My fondness for the song survived. So as the end credits for Ulee’s Gold unrolled against the robust lyricism of Morrison belting out…

Welcome to the Doghouse

The family film Shiloh slipped unheralded into town and is likely to slip back out quickly, since, peculiarly, it’s also being released on video this week. In one medium or the other, it’s worth catching–it being one of the few current movies for kids that doesn’t seem engineered to make…

Whacks and Wayne

Bring earplugs to Batman & Robin. A pair of noseplugs wouldn’t hurt, either. The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long, head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you’re being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal…

New Faces of 1997

The title of John Woo’s Face/Off is meant to be taken literally. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play adversaries who swap faces. Here’s how: FBI agent Sean Archer (Travolta) has been single-mindedly tracking terrorist nut Castor Troy (Cage) ever since Castor’s botched assassination attempt six years earlier, in which he…

Hong Kong and Vine

Face/Off, director John Woo’s new action film with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, is Paramount’s big summer hope. Five years ago, when Warner Bros. offered Woo the project, he passed on it–he didn’t want to do science fiction, preferring something more emotional, he says. Later, producer Michael Douglas brought it…

Pretty Bridesmaid

Nothing against My Best Friend’s Wedding, but it’s a sign of just how vacuous things have become in Hollywood when folks start getting excited about a movie with a handful of partially engaging characters, a fairly intriguing story line and a smattering of clever remarks. Look, that’s what movies are…

On Golden Wand

In a season of lumbering, big-screen circuses, Rough Magic provides a rowdy, creative side show. It’s the kind of haywire high-wire act that suspends the laws of science and grows more involving and comical with every artful near-fall. It’s about magic as both illusion and genuine miracle, and it shuffles…

Buoy Loses Girl

First, the good news: Unlike most action-film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed, illogical…

Miner Classic

The exhilarating, bird-flipping British film Brassed Off is about the systematic destruction of the coal-mining industry in northern England by the Thatcher government in the last decade. It’s set in the fictitious Yorkshire town of Grimley, where a profitable pit is on the verge of closure. Though there is still…

Come Fry With Me

It’s not completely fair to say that the string of hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it’s not too far off: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Days…

boringsomething

It lasted a mere four seasons, but thirtysomething lives on. Its legacy began the moment the show went off the air in 1991: The yuppie-angst fantasy created by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick continues to spawn even now, its children looking almost exactly like the parents. First came My So-Called…

Freud Green Tomatoes

The production notes for Female Perversions could make one think that the film’s title was meant to attract the psychology-grad-student audience. This story of a high-powered lawyer struggling with her sexual confusions is a dramatization of a nonfiction psych study, Dr. Louise Kaplan’s Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary…

Dinovideo!

Filmmakers and audiences have been captivated by the idea of dinosaurs since the primeval days of the cinema. Not until Jurassic Park four years ago, however, have the movies made truly convincing dinosaurs. Which is not to say that film dinosaurs prior to Park and to its current sequel, The…

Spielberg’s Lost

Not only is The Lost World: Jurassic Park the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. He has finally won his Oscar and achieved Great Artist status in Hollywood’s pantheon of the Righteous, but…

A Man of Substance

The Substance of Fire ought to be one of the major critical favorites of 1997. It won’t be, but is worth seeking out while it lingers in town. It’s an adaptation of the acclaimed drama by Jon Robin Baitz about Jewish guilt and familial war. Baitz was 26 when he…

Lust for Lifeless

On the festival tour that helped the necrophiliac Kissed net prerelease praise everywhere from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek, writer-director Lynne Stopkewich said she thought independent films should be judged by their ingenuity and daring rather than by the size of their budgets. As arts-world stump speeches go, it’s a…

Art of Darkness

Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out . . . even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their…

Croc Plot

Okay, metaphor buffs: An “albino alligator” is what the other alligators in a group send out as a sacrificial lamb. Members of a second group of ‘gators attack the albino, and the first group violently finishes off its competition. Once this is explained in the movie Albino Alligator, you know…

Party Girl

In Children of the Revolution, Judy Davis plays Joan Fraser, an Aussie communist who sleeps with Joseph Stalin–their tryst kills him–and, unbeknown to anyone, has his child. Davis takes her character through almost 40 years of agitprop hellfire, and she has scaled her performance big. The movie, however, is rather…