The first film by New Zealander Peter Jackson to gain much notice here was last year’s Dead Alive. This frenzied, farcical splatter parody, about people turned into cannibalistic zombies through the bite of the dreaded Sumatran rat monkey, was like a cinematic coup de grce–it was so revoltingly, yet hilariously,…
The Wolfgang Press Funky Little Demons (4AD) Cranky Little Demons might be a more appropriate description. Showing the equivalent of an extraterrestial’s grasp on what makes music soulful and thus funky, Wolfgang Press spews lyrical references to Motown on the first two cuts and lifts the chorus from the Four…
When art depicts the pornographic, does it cease to be art? If pornography achieves artistic expression, does it cease to be pornography? What about W.H. Auden’s rapturous paeans to buggery, or D.H. Lawrence’s celebration of coitus, or that bawdy unknown ancient poet who wrote Satyricon, in which no perversion was…
At the university, Polonius boasts in Hamlet, he once was accounted a good actor. Hamlet cannot resist asking: “What did you enact?” Polonius brags: “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol; Brutus killed me.” Hamlet teases him: “It was a brute part of him to kill…
Oh, dear, I’m not supposed to go mad ’til 1800! –Graham Chapman as King George III on Monty Python’s Flying Circus Most Americans know King George III of Britain, if at all, as the guy who taxed our butt-kicking forebears into revolt, and whom they eventually beat. Some may remember…
Richard Linklater’s films, so far, have shown a unity of time so disciplined that it would gladden Aristotle’s heart. The young writer/director’s first feature, Slacker, took place in a day and a night on the streets of Austin, Texas. His second, the ’70s period piece Dazed and Confused, took a…
Except for Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, the new film Death and the Maiden is his only film version of a play. Shakespeare to Ariel Dorfman–what a comedown. Still, Polanski did his best–he gave Dorfman’s dreary, annoyingly earnest revenge melodrama about political torture a smooth, elegant rendering onscreen. The…
In the surprisingly crowded genre of documentaries about filmmakers, director Ray Mller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is most likely the best I’ve ever seen, because it deals directly with subjects far more important than filmmaking. That grandly contradictory title is not wasted on Riefenstahl–her life really has…
Talk about showmanship! One of the distinctions co-directors Chris LaMont and Steve Bencich are claiming, probably accurately, for their comedy The Best Movie Ever Made is “the largest mime scene in motion-picture history.” Indeed, the all-mime parody of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is one of the highlights of this mlange…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is arguably Shakespeare’s most exquisitely wrought piece of dramatic construction. Three tales intermingle to weave a magical web of three comic styles. Sophisticated romantic comedy featuring witty ripostes is the manner of the court creatures, ruled by Theseus and his new bride, Hippolyta. The rude mechanicals,…
The Immortals can rest easy. Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Sir Henry Irving, the divine Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore, Sir John Gielgud, Lord Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Sir Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Nicol Williamson, Jonathan Pryce, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mel Gibson, Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes and, now, even…
Red Rock West, the splendid, tight-as-a-drum feature debut of the young writer/director John Dahl, was a comic thriller about a guy trying to get out of a small town. The hero was a decent, honorable young man who tells a tiny lie to get a job, then realizes with horror…
Nobody’s Fool is to Paul Newman’s career what Scent of a Woman was to Al Pacino’s–generously, a “character study”; more frankly, a blatant vehicle, existing for no reason other than to give a great actor a chance to charm us. It’s a much better, much less addlebrained picture than Scent,…
Say you’ve got this wise and war-weary colonel living in Montana around the turn of the century. Say he’s got three pretty-boy sons–the eldest levelheaded, the middle wild and prodigal, the youngest sweet and sensitive. What do you need to turn this scenario into an epic tear-jerker Western in the…
A friend of mine once made the mistake of performing a scene from a Neil Simon play in an acting class. “Stop!” the teacher cried, clutching his head. His objection was not to the acting (although hindsight says it was probably bad). Rather, the teacher complained, Simon’s plays lacked character…
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…
Planet Earth Multi-Cultural Theatre is an alternative theatre that features experimental work. Experimental work implies that the outcome of the procedure is unknown. Any true experiment poses the possibility of failure. It is therefore no crime that Planet Earth’s current offering, Liberating Mama, is a disaster. Laraine Herring has written…
It seemed absurd a few months ago to read the obituaries of Eugene Ionesco. Hadn’t he been dead for years? Was this a variation on the old joke about Franco? Overshadowed by the genius of Samuel Beckett, Ionesco’s plays have seemed like literary footnotes from the past, ranking with those…
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…
