In Get Shorty, John Travolta glided through his role with the confidence and smoothness of a true star, and with an infectious delight at being allowed to show it. The film was a trifle, finally, but Travolta’s effortless command of the screen was reestablished beyond doubt. It’s pleasing to see…
Optimism is the chief cash crop of Las Vegas, and everything about the city–the seductive casinos, the fast marriages, the endless, artificial daytime–is carefully devised to cultivate it. What sets Ben (Nicolas Cage) apart from the millions of other people who go to Vegas is that he’s not in the…
The title of Smoke, which is set in a Brooklyn cigar store, refers to what the characters spend much of the movie blowing at each other. Its informal companion piece, set in the same store, is called Blue in the Face. This time, the title refers to the state that…
In Jim Carrey’s first star vehicle, the hit Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the comedian was “on” every second. He worked himself into a demented frenzy on every line, and in the pauses between the lines. A number of bright people I know assured me that it was a riot, and…
“It’s a simple battle between good and evil.” So says Lon Mabon, chairman of the Oregon Citizens Alliance, of the struggle to pass the title initiative in Heather MacDonald’s documentary Ballot Measure 9. He’s right. There are fewer shades of gray between good and evil in MacDonald’s movie than in…
The older I get, the more people I meet, the more I realize how fortunate I am with regard to family. I come from a fairly large, working-class brood, and while there is never a shortage of minor squabbles, as far as I know there are no significant grudges or…
At the beginning of Feast of July, we see a pregnant young woman, alone, stumbling through cold, desolate moors and mountains. She takes refuge in a run-down, deserted shack, where, wailing loudly, she delivers herself of a stillborn child. She then buries the body in the rocks outside and continues…
Woody Allen and Mel Brooks both started out in movies by making wacky, hip slapstick farces. Allen later grew to be such a snob about comedy that, for an unfortunate period (happily over), he seemed to regard being funny as a form of Jewish self-hatred. Brooks, conversely, has kept dumbing…
Unlike Southeast Asia last week, Agnieszka Holland’s new film Total Eclipse has nary an eclipse, total or partial, in its length. A pity–astronomical phenomena would have provided a bit of diversion. The film concerns the tempestuous relationship between the prodigal French poet Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his older, sort-of…
After rumors that Louis Mall’s Vanya on 42nd Street would open in the Valley proved baseless, there seemed little to do but wait for it to arrive on video. But if you’d rather not see the film in your living room, you can at last catch its Valley premire at…
Kevin Smith’s debut feature, Clerks, was about two young slackers hanging out at their boring counter help jobs, mooning about women, wrangling with skewed customers and ruminating upon bizarre philosophical notions. Smith’s sophomore effort, Mallrats, is about two young slackers hanging around a shopping mall, mooning about women, wrangling with…
The theme of The Scarlet Letter is hypocrisy, and the new film version of this classic never embodies its theme more strikingly than in one of its opening titles: “Freely adapted from the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Yeah, right. Douglas Day Stewart’s script has wildly altered Hawthorne’s plot, to be…
The 1926 masterpiece Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin), the second feature of a wise-ass 27-year-old Soviet director named Sergei Eisenstein, is one of those works whose effect on modern culture almost can’t be overstated. Although Eisenstein already had experimented with the technique he called “montage” in his 1924 debut feature,…
Director Gus Van Sant’s crackling new film To Die For matches up perfectly with the performance of its star, Nicole Kidman. It’s as lean and graceful as a cheetah, and it wears a lewdly sinister grin that intimates you’re being let in on a naughty joke. Watching the film, you…
Ralph–I beg your pardon, “Rafe”–Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, his first full-fledged Hollywood hero, in Strange Days, a futuristic thriller from the penof James Cameron and the eye of Kathryn Bigelow. He’s a schmoozing ex-cop street hustler who deals in illegal virtual reality discs of addictive quality, and Lenny’s fiddling around…
Director Carl Franklin’s 1992 crime thriller One False Move was a complex, fascinating and scarily unpredictable exploration of the tensions between the urban and the rural, between black and white, between criminals and police. While maintaining a harsh and violent moral tone, Franklin didn’t allow himself the luxury of any…
Though much about How to Make an American Quilt is lovely, both visually and emotionally, I don’t know what to make of the picture. The press materials say that it’s about “how women love men.” And so it is, but not centrally–it’s much more concerned with how women get screwed…
The word “tantalize” comes from the Greek myth of Tantalus, who tried to trick the gods into committing cannibalism. The gods apparently regarded this a fairly serious sin on his part, for they devised a horrid punishment for Tantalus in the underworld. He was placed in a pool of water…
Country living is often idealized in the movies, but director Michael Blakemore’s Country Life is about the price of the so-called simple life. The setting is Australia in 1919–just as the lads are returning from the Great War–and cinematographer Stephen Windon captures the outback in ravishing, warm yellows. The rewards…
You have wondered, perhaps, while watching footage of the Paris fashion shows, just where in God’s name the designers got the inspiration for their ill-conceived Halloween costumes. Director Douglas Keeve’s new documentary Unzipped gives us the answer: Nanook of the North. The subject of the film, renowned New York fashion…
The task of writing about the Grateful Dead phenomenon has fallen mainly either to Deadheads, who obviously lack objectivity, or to rock critics, who love to scratch their heads elaborately over the question of why a cult would grow up around this band’s pleasant if somewhat forgettable music. This question…
The actor’s nightmare is of performing in a play for which he has no memory of rehearsing or learning lines. For a movie director, the equivalent nightmare must be presiding over a set on which every imaginable disaster occurs, while attempting to shoot a difficult scene on a tight schedule…
