In the golden age of Hollywood, no less than the likes of Frank Capra owned Christmas on the big screen. But if you want Proof Number 496 of how far things have fallen, consider that in the ’90s, holiday cinema is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chris Columbus–hired gun of…
Hope doesn’t spring eternal: It flickers like an old streetlamp or porch light. That’s the bittersweet message of this beguiling, humane farce about three Jersey City buddies who spiral ever deeper down on their luck while planning to heist an armored car. Sid (William Forsythe), Jerry (Adam Trese) and Russ…
Watching Reese Witherspoon incandesce in the role of a 16-year-old girl stumbling through the reform school of hard knocks in Freeway, I was reminded of what Pauline Kael said about John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: “There is a thick, raw sensuality that some adolescents have which seems almost preconscious.”…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature–in which, by the way, the animals did…
Given his commercial success as a novelist, Kurt Vonnegut hasn’t seen many of his works translated to the big screen. And, given the results with the few that have been filmed, he may wish he hadn’t seen them, either. Counterbalancing George Roy Hill’s interesting and spiritually faithful version of Slaughterhouse…
I’m a great fan of the original Star Trek show and at least one of the films (The Wrath of Khan, of course). Kirk, Spock and McCoy may not have been complex characters, but they were authentically mythic–Kirk was a smug trickster Ulysses, McCoy a crabby Sancho Panza sidekick, Spock…
On its 30th anniversary, Star Trek exists only as fetish or fool’s pastime. The original series continues to air as a faded relic; the Next Generation cast was put to pasture as a film enterprise before its time; and Deep Space Nine and Voyager run and rerun so often you…
Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts–and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too. The writer-director of Truly Madly Deeply and this heartfelt, eye-filling (but problematic and puzzling) adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient salts his movies with passionate specters. In Truly Madly Deeply, the main ghost…
In The Mirror Has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a Columbia University Romantic literature professor who endures a drab, romanceless life. She lives with her imperious, fault-finding mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall)–a beautician, no less–and wards off the attentions of a nebbishy suitor (Austin Pendleton) while pining for the…
Critics normally don’t spend a lot of time praising producers; in a medium that is both commerce and art, our job is to evaluate the art side of the equation. And the assumption is that while producers are raising, counting or raking in moolah, a movie’s aesthetics are in the…
The astonishing documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills starts with a crime that seems unreal, apocryphal: the murder of three 8-year-old boys, one of whom was sexually mutilated, in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993. The filmmakers, Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger, let…
For the past five years, Valley Art Theatre has been gracing our community with Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, an annual collection of cartoons that bursts at the seams with scatology, sex, sacrilege and sophomoric shock. The 1996 edition is now playing, and though it has…
A homeless man stumbles into a New York fish market and asks for a glass of water. The owner’s wife gives it to him, and then, with a strange, sudden urgency, invites him home for dinner. Over her husband’s mild objections, by the end of the evening she’s offered him…
Thrillers that involve a threat to the nuclear family almost always have a reactionary subtext. Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Cape Fear leap to mind. When a director of Ron Howard’s guilelessness makes a film like Ransom, about a rich guy trying to best the man…
The swing in Swingers is in the music and the talk–the self-consciously hip chatter of young men cruising clubs and dancing to big bands. Yet the story of this low-budget romantic comedy unfolds not in the ’20s, ’30s or ’40s but in the ’90s, this decade in which style seems…
A few weeks ago, I saw a preview for William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. A woman in the row behind me remarked, “He must be turning over in his grave.” Shakespeare, she meant. Well, why not? Turning over in one’s grave is part of what Romeo & Juliet is all…
During the MTV Music Awards this year, Dennis Miller cracked that a band he was introducing was “so hip and alternative that Steve Buscemi tried out for a part in it.” Buscemi is to American independent film of the ’90s what Peter Lorre was to wartime noir–the signature character actor…
Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins opens with Collins’ trusted aide Joe O’Reilly (Ian Hart) speaking of his departed leader: “He never did what anyone expected.” But, in fact, Collins (Liam Neeson) does pretty much what is expected of a movie hero: He fills the screen with noble bluster; he aches for…
Last year, Arizona State University’s Gammage Auditorium hosted a special showing of Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece The Battleship Potemkin, accompanied live by the Phoenix Symphony, performing a score cobbled together from various Shostakovich works. I wrote about the event, focusing mainly on Potemkin’s importance in film history, and on the validity…
Trying to decide whether the Million Man March was good or bad, heartening or depressing, can give you a headache. At the center of the ambiguity is Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the march organizer. It’s a stretch to believe that the anti-Semitism and xenophobia attributed to him in…
That Thing You Do! is perfectly beguiling, perfectly skilled, perfectly smart and perfectly harmless. Coming from anyone else, it might seem slick and calculated, but as the debut of Tom Hanks as a writer-director, it seems like an unusually personal piece of moviemaking. The story, which Hanks claims to have…
Corky, a parolee, gets a job fixing up a Chicago apartment next door to one occupied by Ceasar, a gangster, and Violet, his luscious moll. The moment Corky’s and Violet’s eyes meet on the elevator, the sexual tension between them is palpable. Eventually, they become lovers and hatch a daring…
