. . . Heaven admits no jest; wits that presum’d On wit too much . . . with foolish grounds of art Discover’d first the nearest way to Hell. –John Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore A young man starts sleeping with his sister, and she gets pregnant. When she…
The title of young director Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects refers, of course, to a famous laugh line in Casablanca: Police prefect Claude Rains has just witnessed Humphrey Bogart shooting a Nazi bigwig. Instead of having Bogie arrested, Rains turns to his subordinate and deadpans, “Major Strasser has been shot…
Early in Last of the Dogmen, Barbara Hershey and Tom Berenger are exploring the Montana wilderness when she tumbles down a bank to the edge of a cliff. He goes to help her and takes a spill himself. The two are clinging to a rope tied to Berenger’s horse, so…
The big summer studio releases of 1995 cost millions to make. Some low-budget films play at selected art houses. Then there is the no-budget film like The Brothers McMullen. Brothers cost only $20,000 to make, which is less than one wet second of Waterworld. It was filmed mostly on weekends…
Probably the first risqu material worthy of the term “art” that many American males of my generation ever saw was the work of Robert Crumb, king of the underground comics movement of the ’60s. The obsessions and family psychology of this prolific cartoonist, most famous in the mainstream for the…
Teenage Lust is the name noted photographer Larry Clark gave to one of the collections of his work published in book form. The title has the ring of a drive-in exploitation picture of the ’60s. One can almost see the breathless ad copy on the poster: “SEE modern youth driven…
As with most science fiction, Waterworld requires a certain amount of ignorance of, or indifference to, science to enjoy the fiction. The film is an action-adventure set in the distant post-Apocalyptic future–a time when the polar ice caps have been melted by some cataclysm. Surviving humanity lives on skiffs and…
High school teacher LouAnne Johnson gave the title My Posse Don’t Do Homework to the 1992 book she wrote about her experiences teaching gifted but underachieving inner-city kids in California. The producers of the film version have changed the title to Dangerous Minds, which is meaningless, but somehow more painless…
The Postman, a film by a Brit director, based on a Chilean novel and starring an Italian, is an example of a genre that’s become highly popular on the art-house circuit. It might be called the Paradisaical Film, or the Vicarious Vacation Picture–an easygoing romantic period piece set in a…
Sister My Sister is based on a celebrated criminal case from provincial France in the early ’30s–the same case on which Genet based his play The Maids. Scripted by Wendy Kesselman, adapting her play My Sister in This House, and directed by Nancy Meckler, the movie has plenty of lurid…
There is a certain kind of white-male face–leathery, long, hollow-cheeked and often mustachioed–that immediately suggests evil petty authority. Many such faces are in evidence among the actors who play the cops in The Glass Shield, a melodrama about police corruption from the unfortunately obscure writer-director Charles Burnett. The air in…
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,…
