Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One: Vietnam war hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his…
Who is it that forbids me/darkness, and who would give me eyes again? –The Oedipus of Seneca, Act V Spalding Gray is about as economy-minded a showman as you could find. Not only does he require nothing more for his act than a table and chair, a mike, a spiral-bound…
At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom–but, in fact, the similarities are only surface-deep (and just barely that). Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two countries, but wider yet…
What must those poor guys in Insane Clown Posse be thinking? After all, the sad white rap act only made a recording that included profanity, and still it got drop-kicked off panicky, Disney-owned Hollywood Records, a label whose greatest catalogue asset is Queen. Martin Lawrence, on the other hand, got…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
