This much can be said about Striptease, anyway: It comes closer to capturing the spirit, if not the stature, of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders than the current film that appropriates that masterwork’s title. As one woman forced into a shady lifestyle to another, Defoe’s resourceful, foolish, lusty, pious, magnificently human…
Andy Warhol and his circle of ’60s scenemakers are the focus of a cinematic renaissance. I Shot Andy Warhol detailed the attempted assassination of the pop artist by would-be feminist visionary Valerie Solanas. Basquiat, coming soon, features David Bowie as the pale media manipulator of the mid-’70s. And currently at…
At the end of the 1939 film of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Hunchback gazes down from the bell tower of the title edifice at his beloved Esmeralda–Maureen O’Hara, who could make any man feel a bit deformed and subhuman. He’s saved her life repeatedly, yet there…
Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey may be the best TV comics in the movies. The sharpest work to date of that painfully promising and unrealized talent Stiller has been in his marvelous TV sketches, and that is the background of the comedy superstar Carrey, too. Both may feel that they…
The films from the production team of Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson are big, sloppy monuments to male bonding–and not repressed, defensive, John Ford-style male bonding, either; the men of Bruckheimer-Simpson let it all hang out. The films are like Wagnerian versions of the beer ads where the…
Stella Gibbons’ 1932 debut novel Cold Comfort Farm is a sort of war between literary dispositions: Gibbons pits the fatalistic sense of Thomas Hardy’s haunted rustics against the cheery, matter-of-fact sensibility of a cultivated young Jane Austen-cum-P.G. Wodehouse heroine. As Gibbons bets on the latter, Miss Flora Poste, the result…
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In June of 1968, a young, unpublished writer named Valerie Solanas assured herself a footnote in pop-culture history–a very brief footnote.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…
