As Little Odessa has a topnotch cast and promising subject matter, there probably will be a few art-house masochists willing to convince themselves that it’s good. But it’s about as boring a movie as I’ve seen all year. It’s set among the Russian-Jewish gangsters in the title community in Brooklyn’s…
Even without the indignity of having his mug shot taken wearing that wretched JC Penney shirt–which his fashion-model girlfriend probably regards as his most grievous transgression–there would be reason enough to feel badly for Hugh Grant these days. His new movie, Nine Months, though it appears to be chugging along…
The French-Canadian Denys Arcand has been directing films since the early ’60s, but he first attracted the attention of this country in the mid-’80s with The Decline of the American Empire and Jesus of Montreal. Both were gab fests set among Canadian intelligentsia–academics in the former, avant-garde actors in the…
The most subversive approach a progressive artist can take very well might be to present his or her beliefs in a mainstream form. No matter how alarming to the status quo your ideas are, if you can make a solid social drama–like, say, Priest–out of them, you’re on your way…
Wigstock: The Movie is a filmed record of the New York City drag/lip-synch festival founded about a decade ago by a convivial drag diva known as the Lady Bunny. The film includes footage from both the 1993 and 1994 Labor Day weekend observances of the event, the former at Tompkins…
“It’s like a Hollywood B-movie,” mutters the main character of A Pure Formality of his situation. Well, it is and it isn’t. Hollywood B-pictures rarely–occasionally, but rarely–have the visual beauty or atmosphere of this Italian production, and very few pictures have actors of the caliber of this film’s leads, Girard…
Without seeing First Knight again–which I’m in no rush to–I can’t be sure, but I thought I heard King Arthur say, “Nope.” Somebody asks a question of Arthur, played by Sean Connery, and he responds in the negative by saying “nope.” If I heard wrong, then my apologies to Connery,…
Species is a sci-fi horror picture that’s good for a few laughs because, first of all, it’s atrocious, and, secondly, because it has an unbecomingly obvious psychological subtext. This movie made by men is about, to put it crudely, bitches in heat. A la the three Alien films, the monster’s…
In Search and Destroy, Griffin Dunne plays Martin, a wormy little bush-league promoter in Boca Raton, Florida. The town’s name translates as “Mouth of the Rat,” and Martin does seem like something that crawled out of such a place. He owes thousands in back taxes, he’s on the outs with…
The extent to which real life has surpassed the science fiction that many of us read as kids can be quite disorienting. Director Ron Howard’s new film Apollo 13 is an epic true-life space odyssey, and it’s also a period piece. The central character, Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), is one…
One of the production entities claiming responsibility in the opening titles for writer-director Hal Hartley’s film Amateur calls itself “True Fiction Pictures.” Probably this is meant as a slap at the current rage for Pulp Fiction. Indeed, if Quentin Tarantino’s film is the movie equivalent of the hard-boiled crime books,…
Smoke is set in a cigar shop, and the title also makes reference to that which many of the characters blow for much of the film. Written by novelist Paul Auster and directed by Wayne Wang, the film interweaves several story lines around a linking device, as in Twenty Bucks…
The third of Warner Bros.’ Wagnerian Batman films has arrived–it could have been titled Die Fledermaus, Part III. Batman Forever has a new director and a new star in the title role, and before we launch into a debate about their comparative merits, we would probably do well to remember…
When I asked a friend of mine, a devoted Disney-head, if he wanted to join me for a screening of Pocahontas, to my surprise, he declined, muttering, “I don’t know about that movie. It looks a little PC for my taste.” For several reasons, his being one, I think that…
In 1918, the orphaned teenager Riyo leaves Japan for Hawaii and an arranged marriage. She knows her new husband Matsuji only from a letter, in which he calls himself a sugar-cane farmer and addresses a romantic haiku to her, and from his photograph–the grinning, good-looking face of a 20-year-old. When…
The Valley Art Third Annual Gay and Lesbian Film Festival starts this week in Tempe. In the first two selections, the themes of homosexuality and lesbianism, while important, are not the main subject. One is a stark feminist passion play about the religious oppression of women, and the other is…
“Herkermer Homolka; hi, hello.” So says Tim Curry’s character in Congo, introducing himself with admirable alliteration. Herkermer is a Rumanian fortune hunter obsessed with finding the mines of King Solomon, and his eyes gleam as he makes assertions like, “Thees korilla has seen de Lost Ceety of Zeenj!” Wrapping words…
As Hollywood satire, Swimming With Sharks is nothing particularly new. It’s The Player mixed with David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow and a perverse pinch of Reservoir Dogs–Tinseltown bile and a drop or two of blood. This small film is worth seeing, though, for the cleanly written, bitchy dialogue by George Huang, and…
There are movie columns that come free from the neon-lighted glare of the multiplex lobby, from the sweet smell of a thousand spilled kernels of stale popcorn. This is one of them. In June of 1995, I’m at my desk, looking at the blinking cursor on the computer screen before…
Groups of movies on the same subject often arrive too close together to be accounted for only by imitation; it may be one of the more unsubtle workings of the collective unconscious. In 1984, three films were released about the struggle to save a family farm, all of them–Country, The…
Two Thursdays ago, I had the honor to be a judge for the third annual Valley Art Cinematic Society Student Film Festival. In the company of fellow judges Jana Bommersbach, former New Times editor turned TV personality, and Steven Brain, new head of Fox Animation, I watched 43 short films…
If Rocco DeVilliers hadn’t been speeding through Missouri a few years ago, he probably wouldn’t be screening his film Pure Race for the European film market at Cannes. The 25-year-old Tempe resident co-scripted, produced, directed and edited the low-budget indie, played a small role in it and did “probably 90…
