Most of the interview subjects in Jonathan Blank’s documentary Sex, Drugs and Democracy don’t look much like libertines. We see a prostitute here, a hippie or a Rastafarian there, and a couple of artsy types, but most of the Dutch folks Blank shows us extolling the merits of the Netherlands’…
As Ty Cobb in Ron Shelton’s new biopic, Tommy Lee Jones gets to wave a pistol and vomit blood. What kind of an actor would he be if he could resist that? He doesn’t blow the chance–he’s remarkable as the man who, most commentators agree, was both the greatest baseball…
The title that Charles Schulz originally wanted to use for his comic strip was not Peanuts, but Li’l Folks. Perhaps Schulz, who once said that children were “caricatures of adults,” was thinking along the same lines as Louisa May Alcott when she gave her most beloved novel the name Little…
Increasingly common in bookstores over the last few years have been literary anthologies of “erotica–by women for women.” Erotique is probably the first such collection done for the movies. Like Boys Life, which opened last week in the Valley, it’s an omnibus of three half-hour shorts by as many directors…
To mock Nell would be neither difficult nor entirely unwarranted–what’s bad in this movie is so irritatingly God-awful that you may want to scream. But what’s good in it is good enough to make up for some of the sentiment and cheesy didacticism. Jodie Foster plays the title character, a…
Boys Life is an omnibus consisting of three roughly half-hour works, all by young filmmakers and all concerning the tribulations of the first homosexual experience for middle-class white guys of late-high school/early-college age. They are low-key films of no particular cinematic daring, but this modesty makes all three affecting and…
“Sexual harassment isn’t about sex, it’s about power.” So says a lawyer who specializes in harassment cases, in the film version of Michael Crichton’s best seller Disclosure. Later in the movie, the hero, an executive who is both the accused and the accuser in a harassment case, quotes this line…
The title of writer/director George Gallo’s new film is Trapped in Paradise. I certainly felt like I was trapped somewhere, but paradise wouldn’t have been my guess. This execrable attempt at a farce is, I think, the second-worst big-studio comedy of the year, surpassed only by Exit to Eden for…
Bad dates are a purgatorial experience common to most people who have been single for any length of time. Common, but not identical, however. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s (highly questionable!) observation about happy and unhappy families, all good dates are the same, but each bad date is bad in its own…
Santa Claus is the single greatest shill–except maybe for Bill Cosby–that the retail industry has ever had, and unlike Cosby, he comes dirt cheap. On the local level, minimum wage will usually cover it. Of course, the fees run a little higher in Hollywood. No doubt it cost the makers…
After a few years as a bit player and standup comic, Keenen Ivory Wayans made an impressive debut as writer/director/star in 1988 with I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, a lampoon of the “blaxploitation” films of the early ’70s. This scrappy, no-budget indie was probably the best of the freeform genre…
The profession of Leon, the title character of director Luc Besson’s The Professional, is murder. Like the lethal similar character also played by Jean Reno in Besson’s La Femme Nikita, by whom he was probably inspired, Leon is a “cleaner,” an assassin of preternatural skill who leaves no traces. This…
Junior is obviously the product of a one-sentence pitch–“Schwarzenegger gets pregnant!” somebody said, and was told to run with it. Arnie, his co-star Danny DeVito and the director, Ivan Reitman, collaborated previously on a similar high-concept comedy outing–“Schwarzenegger and DeVito are the stars, and we call it Twins!” Well, if…
Clerks calls to mind Eddie Murphy’s story of his first standup routine, performed when he was an adolescent. He had had none of the sexual or other adult experiences that comedians normally draw on for material, so he used the only “blue” subject he was acquainted with, and told jokes…
After much carping, since recanted, by author/adapter Anne Rice about Tom Cruise’s suitability as one of the leads, the film version of Rice’s wildly popular novel Interview With the Vampire has at last reached the screen. With it, the New Gothic arrives full force as a mainstream vogue, though it’s…
Since the mid-’80s, Woody Allen has maintained a steady output of films, working in two distinct modes. The ambitious Allen of Manhattan, Interiors, Another Woman and Crimes and Misdemeanors deals, sometimes with humor but usually not, with issues of art, love, sex and existential angst, trying like crazy to be…
Before we dip into the treasure chest of sound this month, let me tell you to go see the Fastbacks. Simply one of the best bands ever to emerge from the Pacific Northwest (that means Seattle). That’s at Boston’s on Tuesday, with Jeff Dahl. And, on the home front, Idols…
The most erotic moments in movies, as in life, tend to have a spontaneous, uncontrived quality. This may be utterly illusory–intense thought and care may have gone into crafting the abrupt kiss or smoldering stare or well-turned piquant phrase that seems so urgently and inexplicably sexy. But at their best,…
Though it has been remade at least a half-dozen times for film and television, and at least twice for the stage, no adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1908 penny dreadful The Phantom of the Opera makes quite the same claim on the emotions as the original film of 1925. It’s a…
Watching a documentary about the lives of people of no notable accomplishment could be as entertaining as watching winter grass grow. 35 Up has watched 14 people grow for 28 years, and it is fascinating. In 1964, Great Britain’s Granada television program, World in Action, interviewed a group of 7-year-old…
The term “art film” might have been coined to describe Peter Greenaway’s movies. They embody everything, good and not so good, that is suggested by that usually unhelpful label. They play in “art house” theatres, and they are arty in their (not always unjustified) pretensions. But above all this, Greenaway’s…
If Pirandello had ever made a splatter movie, it would probably have been along the lines of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare–the title might be Five Knives in Search of a Sequel. Wes Craven, writer-director of the first (and only good) A Nightmare on Elm Street film, back in 1984, has…
