Several people walked out of the Barcelona screening I attended. I could only assume they disliked the talkiness and slow pace of this mild comedy of manners, which recounts the romantic adventures of a couple of Americans living abroad in the early 80s. There’s a fine touch of irony to…
My Life’s in Turnaround, a low-budget movie by two slacker types about two slacker types trying to make a low-budget movie, is subtitled Based on a True Story. This same joke was the punch line of Mel Brooks’ most neglected film, Silent Movie. The hero (Brooks) is a director who…
Not having read the books, I can’t say if the film versions of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels have been faithful. Based on the content of the movies, I can see no evidence that unfaithfulness would constitute a crime against world literature. This was especially true of The Hunt for…
After a successful run last season at Theater Works’ small Glendale playhouse, Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim’s story of the razor-wielding barber who cuts throats as his part in the meat-pie business, is now in Herberger Theater Center’s Center Stage. Director David Wo has brought some members of the original Glendale…
Out of every five people you meet, four feel that their mothers and/or fathers were wretched failures as parents. The sentiment can be kind of funny when you hear it from some stupid kid, but it isn’t funny at all when–as is often the case–it has dogged and haunted the…
After human beings, the cinema probably doesn’t have a greater visual subject, among living creatures, than the horse. I say this as no particular horse fancier in real life, but as an admirer of horses in movies, a medium far more suited to the beauties of the species than painting…
Comedy director Andrew Bergman, who broke in working on scripts for Mel Brooks, is gifted but uneven. In 1990, he wrote and directed The Freshman, a piece of glittering nuttiness built around a beautiful, career-consummating performance by Marlon Brando. The film could only have been the work of an audacious…
After seeing Foreign Student, you may want to talk yourself into the idea that it’s a put-on of some sort. Intended as a weeper of the “Ah, my lost youth . . .” variety, it centers on Phillippe, a young Parisian guy who comes to a college in rural Virginia…
John Cale’s been a busy man the past 30 years. He’s performed marathon piano pieces with John Cage. He co-founded the Velvet Underground, one of the half-dozen most important acts in rock history. Cale’s served as mentor-producer to the likes of the Stooges, Patti Smith, and Squeeze, and his solo…
Hooray for Hollywood, I guess. From what other source can one see Jamie Lee Curtis and Tia Carrere, both in slinky evening wear, having a yowling catfight in the back seat of a black limousine with a dead driver speeding toward a blown-up bridge while a helicopter descends from above?…
With movie adaptations of John Grisham potboilers, the third time has proved the charm. The Firm was limp, and The Pelican Brief wasn’t brief enough. The Client is nothing remotely special, just a routine legal melodrama with some major improbabilities flopping around in it. But director Joel Schumacher, abetted by…
At the beginning of Forrest Gump, a tiny white feather flits in the breeze above Savannah, Georgia. As the credits end, the feather comes to rest on the ground, between the sneaker-shod feet of the title character, who’s waiting at a bus stop. This sequence illustrates the theme of the…
The beauty of This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner’s first and best work as a director, was that it simultaneously zapped the pretensions both of a species of pop music and of a species of cinema. Heavy metal got an affectionate working over from the film, a sham documentary supposedly…
“You either go mad or you learn about metaphors.” Allie Light, who made this remark, has done both. Years after being hospitalized for extreme depression, the San Francisco woman became a filmmaker. Her latest is Dialogues With Madwomen, and in addition to directing this unconventional and touching documentary, she is…
Over at Disney, they’ve been brushing up on their Shakespeare the last few years. Think about it–The Little Mermaid had characters named Ariel and Sebastian, as in The Tempest, and Aladdin had a trouble-making, tale-carrying villain named Iago. Even in the Gallic Beauty and the Beast, the brute Gaston’s toadying…
If there was one legendary figure of the Old West who could unambiguously be called a good guy–and there probably wasn’t–Wyatt Earp is surely not the fellow. This sometime lawman, sometime criminal wasn’t actually despicable, like Billy the Kid (although reports suggest Earp had less charm). He was a person…
I am obliged to consider . . . that the assertion that men are turned into wolves and back to themselves again is false, otherwise we must also believe in all the other things that over so many generations we have discovered to be fabulous. –Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia…
The central character of the Mexican horror movie Cronos is a kindly old man named Jess Gris, the proprietor of a Mexico City curio shop. The luckless Jess finds, amid the dusty bric-a-brac of his shop, a little metal gadget in the shape of a scarab, built by a 16th-century…
Indians in the movies go back about as far as movies themselves. While there’s been enough consciousness-raising in recent decades that only the most naive audience members could still believe that the movie Indians–both noble and savage–we’ve all been brought up on are accurate reflections of real Native Americans, the…
Nonthreatening gentleness and prettiness have made Keanu Reeves a teen heartthrob, and the hint of exoticism in his looks has made him a figure of glamour for some adults, as well. If he were a sizzling good actor, he’d have the world at his feet. But alas, poor fellow, he…
“That Fred Flintstone–what an actor!” enthuses a morgue attendant in the Ron Howard comedy Night Shift. I’ve never particularly agreed. Although I dutifully watched, as a kid, Hanna-Barbera’s endlessly rerun cartoon series, which turned humankind’s prehistoric past into a 50s-style, suburban tract-house wonderland, I found it unsophisticated even then–my cartoon…
It isn’t often that I show any prescience, but I had a rare burst a couple of years ago, when I reviewed House Party 2, a Kid N Play vehicle. It was a mostly lousy little picture, and I said so, but I mentioned a grinning, rubber-faced kid named Martin…
